| 词源 |
Swahili. Swahili is not spoken by more Africans than any other language, as is widely believed. This record is held by Hausa, spoken in Nigeria and other parts of West Africa, with some 25 million speakers in all, many of its words borrowed from Arabic. But Swahili, more correctly called Kiswahili, with more than 10 million speakers, is the most important language of East Africa, being the official language of Kenya and Tanzania, while spoken fluently in many other countries as a second language. Basically its vocabulary is Bantu but there are many Arabic borrowings. Swahili itself derives from an Arabic word meaning coastal, the language having devel- oped in the seventh century among Arabic-speaking settlers of the African coast. |