The Swahili Language
By: Fatima Mahmoud
The United Nations has decided July 7 of each year dedicated the celebration of World Swahili Language Day. Swahili is a Bantu language on the coast of East Africa; it is a common language of communication among East African countries and is among the intentional languages of the African Union and Swahili-speaking countries (Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Comoros, Zambia, Madagascar, Mozambique, Malawi and Oman). It is the official language for Tanzania and Comoros and the second language in Kenya after the English language.
The total number of Swahili speakers varies from 50 million to more than 200 millions people. Swahili derived much of its Arabic and Sanskrit vocabulary as a result of contact with Indian and Arabs merchants on the coast of Southeast Africa. There are also words from Portuguese, which were written in Arabic calligraphy in the past, but now that's have written in Latin script.
The importance of using the Swahili language among African people that's the one of the means of promotion the African identity.
Efforts to promote the using of Swahili as the language of all Africans have already been initiated since the sixties by Julius Nyerere, Tanzania's first post-independence president, who used Swahili to unite the people of his country after independence from British rule. Moreover ,
In 2019, Swahili became the only African language recognized by the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Ethiopia's Addis Ababa University also recently announced that it would begin teaching Swahili. In addition to Egypt's role in promoting African languages, including Swahili, the Department of African Languages has been established since 1967 at the Faculty of Languages and Translation at Al-Azhar University, followed by many Egyptian universities to teach it, such as Al-Azhar University, Cairo and Ain Shams, as well as Aswan University. This is due to the importance of the Swahili language in promoting African identity and joint relations between the countries of the African continent.
