User:Wambui254/sandbox

Filamuu - Watch Swahili movies & TV shows online or stream right to your smart TV, game console, PC, Mac, mobile, tablet and more.

Filamuu
Filamuu - Watch Swahili movies & TV shows online or stream right to your smart TV, game console, PC, Mac, mobile, tablet and more.

Swahili, also known as Kiswahili (translation: language of the Swahili people), is a Bantu language and the first language of the Swahili people. It is a lingua franca of the African Great Lakes region and other parts of eastern and south-eastern Africa, including Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Mozambique, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).[1] Comorian, spoken in the Comoros Islands is sometimes considered to be a dialect of Swahili, though other authorities consider it a distinct language.[2]

The exact number of Swahili speakers, be it native or second-language speakers, is unknown and a matter of debate. Various estimates have been put forward and they vary widely, from 100 million to over 150 million.[3] Swahili serves as a national language of four nations: Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, and the DRC. Shikomor, the official language in Comoros and also spoken in Mayotte (Shimaore), is related to Swahili.[4] Swahili is also one of the working languages of the African Union and officially recognised as a lingua franca of the East African Community.[5] South Africa legalized the teaching of Swahili in South African schools[when?] as an optional subject to begin in 2020.[6]

A significant fraction of Swahili vocabulary derives from Arabic,[7] in part conveyed by Arabic-speaking Muslim inhabitants. For example, the Swahili word for "book" is kitabu, traceable back to the Arabic word كتاب kitāb (from the root k-t-b "write"). However, the Swahili plural form of this word ("books") is vitabu, rather than the Arabic plural form كتب kutub, following the Bantu grammar in which ki- is reanalysed as a nominal class prefix, whose plural is vi-.[8]

References