Babel, page 13
Swahili
SELF-DESIGNATION Kiswahili. Also used in English.
FAMILY Swahili belongs to the large Bantu branch of the Niger-Congo family. Bantu languages are spread across Central, East and Southern Africa. The rest of the Niger-Congo family dominates a smaller area, mostly in West Africa.
SCRIPT Swahili today is written in the Latin alphabet. Before Europe’s ‘scramble for Africa’ around 1900, the Arabic script was used.
GRAMMAR Swahili nouns fall into a range of different noun classes, somewhat comparable to the genders that most European languages have. Each of these classes has its own prefixes, one for singular, one for plural. Other words – verbs, adjectives, even prepositions – assume different forms depending on the class of the noun.
SOUNDS Swahili is highly exceptional for a Bantu language in not having tone.
LOANWORDS Around 30 per cent of the Swahili vocabulary is of Arabic origin, with English a distant second at about 10 per cent. Swahili developed in the contact between East African coastal dwellers and Arab clove farmers, traders and (later) rulers, particularly from Oman.
EXPORTS The most common English loanword from Swahili is safari, which has Arabic roots. The name of Kwanzaa, a week-long festival celebrated mostly by African-Americans, is derived from Swahili matunda ya kwanza or ‘first fruits’. The colonial bwana for ‘master’ was another Swahili word. While not loans exactly, several of the names in the film The Lion King are of Swahili origin, including that of the main character: Simba means ‘lion’. And yes, hakuna matata really does mean ‘no worries’, or literally ‘there are no problems’.
YOUTH The oldest known documents in Swahili are from the early eighteenth century: letters from 1711 on and a long poem dated 1728. This makes its written literature easily the youngest among our twenty Babel languages.
12: Swahili
Africa’s nonchalant multilingualism
As I don’t know you personally, I could be wrong, but my considered guess is that in terms of language-learning you are, well, shall I be frank? – a dunce. A dunce, I hasten to add, compared to Jonas from Jilve.
Not that you’re to blame, mind you.
If you grew up in a country like Britain or the United States, chances are that English was the language that your parents spoke to you as a child. So did the telly, so did the babysitter. As you grew up, you discovered that the outside world too was awash with English: neighbours and shopkeepers spoke it, teachers and classmates, priests and politicians – the language was everywhere, as far as the ear could hear. Later on, you and your companion probably shared the same old language. And so it’s likely to remain for the rest of your life: from your first word to your last breath, you rarely need anything but the language of William Shakespeare, Oprah Winfrey and Homer Simpson. You may have learnt a foreign language, or even several, but barring migration you’re unlikely to ever need them (as opposed to using them recreationally).
As the world’s linguistic powerhouse, English is rather extreme in this respect. However, if you grew up in, say, France, Spain, Mexico, Brazil or Korea, your story is likely to be more or less the same, because throughout Europe, the Americas and East Asia, substantial portions of the population lead largely monolingual lives.
But not in Africa.
Africa is where we find people like the aforementioned Jonas. I can’t tell you Jonas’s family name, because it was very properly withheld by Leslie C. Moore, the American linguist who met him during her research. But we know that he was born around 1980 in the village of Jilve in Cameroon’s northern Mandara mountains; that, unusually for his village, he completed primary school and even went to secondary school; and that his life is about as far removed from being monolingual as can be.
Jonas’s linguistic saga started at home, where he acquired not only his mother tongue, Vame, but also a ‘father tongue’, Wuzlam. So he was bilingual at the tender age of four, albeit in languages with just a few thousand speakers each. Next came Wandala, the region’s lingua franca (language of interethnic communication), spoken by a few tens of thousands and the favoured lingo of the school playground. Vame, Wuzlam and Wandala are quite closely related, belonging as they do to the Central branch of the Chadic family, but they’re not mutually intelligible. Also in primary school, Jonas had to come to grips with French (language number 4), which is the main official language of Cameroon and the medium of education in most of the country. A few years later, he was also formally taught English (5), the country’s other official language.
While in secondary school, Jonas began to court a girl named Gogo, and even though the two of them spoke Wandala and Wuzlam, he decided to learn her mother tongue, Mada (6). No doubt he did so for the reason famously cited by Nelson Mandela when asked why he studied the Afrikaans of the apartheid regime: if you speak to a person in their own language, your words go straight to their heart. Schmaltzy, perhaps, but true.
Secondary school, which was situated outside the Wandalaspeaking area, brought two further lingua francas into Jonas’s life: Zulgwa (7), yet another Central Chadic language spoken in the neighbourhood around the school, and Fula (8), spoken by the majority of both students and townspeople.* This last addition to Jonas’s repertoire was a highly useful one, as it enabled him to communicate with some 25 million people spread across twenty or so countries, mostly to the west of Cameroon. But it wasn’t easy to learn: belonging to the Niger-Congo family, it is as unrelated to his other African languages as English is to, say, Hungarian.
A billion Jonases?
Truth be told, this story is exceptional, even by African standards. Partly, this is because Cameroon is a hotspot of linguistic variety: the country has around ten languages for each one million inhabitants – 250 languages in all. Another reason is that Jonas’s community of Wuzlam speakers belongs to a multilingual ethnic group called the Montagnards (French for ‘mountain dwellers’) or Kirdi, in whose culture language-learning is particularly valued. And then there’s Jonas’s individual biography: thanks to his many years of education, he was exposed to a greater range of languages than his peers, both in the classroom and in the street. Being a Montagnard, he happily learnt whatever seemed useful to him. Most other Africans in his situation might have chosen not to spend energy on the town’s Zulgwa nor on the girl’s Mada, wooing her in Wuzlam instead. But even Africans less voracious than Jonas would still have learnt the other six – and not given it another thought.
This chapter focuses on Swahili, which is spoken in East Africa: mostly in Tanzania and Kenya, where it originated, but also in Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda, the eastern half of Congo and smaller parts of Mozambique and other neighbouring countries. Even in Southern Africa, people are more likely to learn Swahili than, say, Amharic, for the same reason Europeans would sooner learn Italian than Romanian: Swahili and Italian yield a better return on one’s investment.
The Swahili region doesn’t bubble, churn and gurgle with linguistic plenty in the way Cameroon does. Kenya and Tanzania, at the historical heart of the Swahili region, have two languages per one million inhabitants; in the rest of the region, the number is nearer one per one million, perhaps even less.
While Swahili will be the main star in this chapter, it will have to share the limelight with its relatives and neighbours. That’s because I want the story to be about sub-Saharan Africa as a whole (hereafter called Africa for short), as its linguistic landscape is markedly different from that of other continents. A practical consideration is that we won’t get a second chance to visit it, as Swahili is the only African language in this book.
Perhaps the most crucial similarity between East Africa’s Swahili region, West Africa’s Cameroon and Africa generally is this: when daily life throws a new language at them, people are unfazed and willing to learn it (as in ‘start speaking it’, not ‘take a course’). The main difference between the Swahili region and the rest of the continent is precisely the presence of this friendly giant called Swahili. To give an idea of how exceptional that is: the language has at least twice, perhaps three times as many speakers as Africa’s number two, Hausa. Small wonder that several intellectuals, most famously Nigerian Nobel literature prize winner Wole Soyinka, have made the case for Swahili as a continental lingua franca. And when the Ghanaian historian K. A. Kumi Attobrah launched an Esperanto-like auxiliary language for Africa in 1970, he based it on Swahili and named it Afrihili.
If Africans don’t dread tackling a new language when it seems useful, how many do they end up learning? As we saw in Jonas’s case, that depends on their personal circumstances and on local cultural values. But as a broad generalisation, the answer would be three: a mother tongue, a lingua franca and what I will call a ‘VIL’ – a Very Important Language. One of several factors to muddle this neat picture is that many languages can appear in two of these roles simultaneously and a few, including Swahili, even in all three. Still, mother tongue, lingua franca and VIL are three serviceable poles (think tent poles, not magnetic poles) for the basic framework; real-life complexity will be added later.
‘VIL’ may be a playful term and you won’t find it in other texts about African linguistics, but I think it does a good job of representing a range of different situations. Typically, the VIL is the country’s official language as well as the medium of instruction in all education beyond primary school; typically, it’s what the urban higher classes speak and what journalists and literary authors write in. Typically, it’s those things – but not always all of them. A country may have several official languages or none at all, education may be multilingual, some famous authors may prefer to write in their mother tongues, et cetera. Nonetheless, in nearly every African country it’s obvious which is the VIL.
Also in nearly every African country (as in the Americas), the VIL is of European origin. Both English and French are Very Important in roughly twenty countries; Portuguese is a distant third with five. In three countries (plus North Africa, not considered here), the VIL is Arabic, which similarly was introduced from outside, but centuries earlier. In several countries, such as Zimbabwe, one or more languages of African origin are ‘officially official’, but in practice they play second fiddle. Countries where African languages have risen to VIL status are few: Tanzania, Ethiopia and Somalia.
Even back in German colonial times, before the First World War, Swahili was taught in Tanzanian schools.
Even Swahili is still struggling to attain the role that an innocent outsider would expect this giant to fulfil as a matter of course. Only in Tanzania has it indisputably come out on top. In Kenya it’s as widespread as in Tanzania, but in both formal status and social prestige it lags far behind English. For a long time its legal position was that of ‘national language’, which throughout Africa is a polite term for ‘officially irrelevant’. Only in 2010 did it become Kenya’s second official language. In Uganda, where Swahili is less widely spoken, the government chose English at independence (1962), then added Swahili as an official language ten years later, only to abandon it in 1995 and to change its mind once more ten years after that. Last time I checked, Swahili maintained its official status, but English still had more prestige and Luganda more speakers. Outside Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda, Swahili is merely a lingua franca.
What people speak…
Africans speak three languages, I claimed: a mother tongue, a lingua franca and a Very Important Language. But including the VIL in this triad may be considered an exaggeration. In most countries where a language of European origin has this status, it is spoken by only a minority of the population. On the other hand, English, French and, above all, perhaps surprisingly, Portuguese are making considerable headway, especially in cities, so maybe the above claim is not so much exaggerated as premature.
While most Africans do not at this stage speak their national VILs, many have mastered more than one lingua franca, bringing the average per person close to three again. That’s because it’s not uncommon for there to be several lingua francas spoken in close proximity to each other. Jonas, you’ll remember, first acquired one lingua franca as a young kid and then two more as an adolescent: one local, the other spoken throughout West Africa. In Uganda, two lingua francas – Swahili and Luganda – are fairly widespread and people who have use for them will not hesitate to learn both. Congo has four important lingua francas, including Swahili, and again, it’s not as if speaking one stops anybody from learning another if the need should arise.
Finally, and obviously, Africans have their mother tongues, of which there are over one thousand, two thousand or three thousand, depending on who you ask.* As a result, it’s by no means rare to find spouses with different mother tongues. Their children may well grow up bilingually, speaking what in the case of Jonas I’ve labelled a mother and a father tongue. (To be exact, he learnt his ‘mother tongue’ not from his mother but from her relatives, as local culture prescribes that she speak her husband’s language to the children. That’s the sort of real-life complexity that I promised.)
Many mother tongues have a very limited reach: they’re the local lingos of just one clan or a few villages. Others are spoken by large ethnic groups spread across several countries. The larger mother tongues may at the same time be lingua francas for native speakers of smaller languages: Jonas learnt Fula as a lingua franca, but it’s also spoken natively by over 20 million. Swahili goes one better by fulfilling three different roles: VIL in Tanzania, lingua franca in a much larger area, and mother tongue for several million people in the Zanzibar archipelago and along the Indian Ocean coast. In some African cities, the European languages too are widening their functions: from VIL to lingua franca, and in some elite families even to the status of mother tongue.
… but don’t write
VILs have a crucial feature to distinguish them from the other two categories: they are written much more. Some African languages have been committed to paper for centuries and today many of them have standardised spelling systems, whether in the Latin, Arabic or Ethiopic alphabet (also called Ge’ez – ). In practice, however, only a few of them are written to any great extent. Many African authors prefer English, French or Portuguese for the same reason that made me choose English for this book rather than my native Dutch: it gives them (us) access to the international market. But in their case, that can’t be the whole story: even African works of purely local interest are mostly published in one of the European languages. There is an additional reason beyond the commercial one for writers to prefer these to their mother tongues: readers, even those who are staunch speakers of African languages, find it easier going. Reading a language they’re not used to seeing in print feels to them much like reading the dialect dialogue in Huckleberry Finn feels to us: we get slowed down by the unfamiliar appearance of the words.
Journalism too is written mostly in European languages (and to a lesser extent in Arabic). Even in Tanzania, Somalia and Ethiopia, with their African VILs, English is highly visible in print and online media. For several other countries, my online searches didn’t turn up a single news magazine in an African language. This can’t be for economic reasons only, since far more people understand the lingua francas than English or French. Rather, it would seem that roughly half a century after independence, readers and writers still have a preconception that African languages cannot fulfil the ‘modern’ roles that colonial languages have played for several generations. Swahili proves them wrong, if proof were needed.
Normal folks, not prodigies
Unless you grew up in the same continent as Jonas and his fellow polyglots, you may be beginning to feel that in language-learning, as in long-distance running, you can’t compete with these Africans. They’re just too good at it. Something in their build, one assumes; something genetic that makes the rest of humanity look like hopeless laggards. When it comes to running, there’s something to that: East Africans, and Kenya’s Kalenjin in particular, are more likely to be blessed with certain physical qualities that are ideally suited to long-distance running. But as ever, genes are far from the whole story. It took a few initial successes to kindle the athletic ambitions in a great number of young East Africans, which in turn multiplied the likelihood of latent talents manifesting themselves. Only people who train for and participate in races can ever prove their excellence and become champions. Kenyans have done and achieved just that.
On the menu in Arusha, Tanzania. MENU, CHIPSI, SUPU and ROST are English borrowings, KARIBUNI (‘welcome’) is of Arabic origin. NYAMA is a very widespread Bantu word for ‘meat’. Many Swahili words for abstract concepts have Arabic roots.
How does this work for language-learning? Can African multilingualism too be explained by a mixture of genes and social factors? In the individual case of Jonas, there may be an element of innate talent in the sense that he seems to possess aboveaverage intelligence. But his choosing to learn some languages that were merely useful rather than indispensable has more to do with the culture of his ethnic group, where multilingualism is considered a good thing in itself. Regarding the average African, the explanation is even simpler: their personal multilingualism is due to the multilingualism of their societies. If you lead your life among people who speak different languages, you have a reason to learn them – and opportunities for practice.
My own experience confirms this connection between necessity, opportunity and achievement. The only foreign languages that I’m any good at are those that I needed and had ample time to practice. I needed German when, back in my teens, I fell in love with a German girl, which enabled me to practice to my heart’s delight. I needed Spanish when as an undergraduate I did research in Peru, where I spoke little else for half a year. Later on, a job motivated me to improve my English. I did, but never having lived in an English-speaking country, my speaking proficiency lags somewhat behind my writing skills to this day and my vocabulary is a tad bookish. My French speaking skills, however, are a persistent embarrassment, even though my father taught the language and I sat through six years of lessons (not his) in secondary school. The reason is that I’ve never needed to speak it for any sustained period. All my later, mostly curiosity-driven attempts at mastering languages were too half-hearted to bear fruit – remember the Vietnamese fiasco. Putting in the hours is the hard bit in learning.
