Thread: Swahili vs Kiswahili

Here´s what Encyclopaedia Britannica has to say on the subject:


There are about 15 main Swahili dialects, as well as several pidgin forms in use. The three most important dialects are kiUnguja (or Kiunguja), spoken on Zanzibar and in the mainland areas of Tanzania; kiMvita (or Kimvita), spoken in Mombasa and other areas of Kenya; and kiAmu (or Kiamu), spoken on the island of Lamu and adjoining parts of the coast. Standard Swahili is based on the kiUnguja dialect.


And speaking of Arabic, Swahili has received a great number of Arabic loanwords--including "Swahili" itself!

Since Swahili is a macrolanguage with many dialects, it's not a simple task to regulate it. However, it seems that there are institutions like BAKITA, CHAKITA and BAKAMA that regulate it may help to maintain a vehicular Swahili for all communities.

Originally Posted by Will_S

Bonus fun fact about [Ki]Swahili: they have a different system of telling time, based on sunrise/sunset. As most Swahili speakers live very close to the equator, sunrise and sunset are fairly consistent year-round at about 6 AM and 6 PM (local time), respectively. In the Swahili system of marking time, 6 AM (sunrise) is the first hour: 1 o´clock. 7 AM would be 2 o´clock, and so on. This could come in very handy for localization.

That is really interesting. I didn't know the concept of time could be so different from our own!

Nice, so "Swahili" is the typical demonym ended with -i that comes from Arabic! We have a lot in Spanish by the way.

Check the Piraha language and you'll see that they don't even know the notion of past!