OK, I have to laugh as someone who speaks the two most common languages spoken in Africa: English and French. Portugese is the third.
Swahili, which takes around 40% of its vocabulary directly from Arabic, was initially spread by Arab traders along East Africa's coast.It was then formalised under the German and British colonial regimes in the region in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, as a language of administration and education.
And though it has been spoken about before as an alternative on the continent to English, French or Portuguese as a lingua franca, or as a commonly understood language, there is now a renewed impetus.
What is getting lost here is that Swahili is also a "coloniser's language". The Swahili helped inland Africans trade ivory, grain, and even slaves, for the foreign merchants' knives, farming tools, fabrics, and porcelain.
Slave Trade and Slavery on the Swahili Coast, 1500-1750: Arab traders captured Zanj to enslave them, but generally speaking, medieval geographers rarely mentioned the slave trade on the Swahili coast, although they often did so for other regions, particularly western Africa.
In other words, Swahili, even though it is a Bantu language is also culpable if we are going to talk about the slave trade. But the common link between Swahili, English, French, and Portugese is that they allowed diverse linguistic groups to get along.
Africa has something in common with Europe and some other places: that is multiple small cultures speaking mutually incomprehensible languages (there's a post about that coming up). So, having a standard common language helps make things run smoothly. It's fun listening to ignorant people talk about language since:
Various colonial powers that ruled on the coast of East Africa played a role in the growth and spread of Swahili. With the arrival of the Arabs in East Africa, they used Swahili as a language of trade as well as for teaching Islam to the local Bantu peoples. This resulted in Swahili first being written in the Arabic alphabet. The later contact with the Portuguese resulted in the increase of vocabulary of the Swahili language. The language was formalised in an institutional level when the Germans took over after the Berlin conference. After seeing there was already a widespread language, the Germans formalised it as the official language to be used in schools. Thus schools in Swahili are called Shule (from German Schule) in government, trade and the court system. With the Germans controlling the major Swahili-speaking region in East Africa, they changed the alphabet system from Arabic to Latin.
I think I've mentioned how many different native languages exist in Africa, but it is a major shitload.
Dig deeply enough and you will find the major languages owe a lot to colonization and trade.
And that includes Swahili.
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