The Swahili people (Swahili: WaSwahili, وَسوَحِيلِ) comprise mainly Bantu, Afro-Arab and Comorian ethnic groups inhabiting the Swahili coast, an area encompassing the Zanzibar archipelago and mainland Tanzania's seaboard, littoral Kenya, northern Mozambique, the Comoros Islands and Northwest Madagascar.
The original Swahili distinguished themselves from other Bantu peoples by self-identifying as Waungwana (the civilised ones). In certain regions (e.g. Lamu Island), this differentiation is even more stratified in terms of societal grouping and dialect, hinting to the historical processes by which the Swahili have coalesced over time. More recently, however, through a process of swahilization, this identity is extended to any person of African descent who speaks Swahili as their first language, is Muslim, and lives in a town on the main urban centres of most of modern-day Tanzania and coastal Kenya, northern Mozambique and the Comoros.[10]
The name Swahili originated as an exonym for the language derived from Arabic: سواحل, romanized: Sawāhil, lit. 'coasts'. Swahili people speak the Swahili language. Swahili people's endonym for themselves is Waungwana, which means "the civilized ones."[10] Modern Standard Swahili is derived from the Kiunguja dialect of Zanzibar. Like many other world languages, Swahili has borrowed a large number of words from foreign languages, particularly administrative terms from Arabic, but also words from Portuguese, Hindi and German. Other, older dialects like Kimrima and Kitumbatu have far fewer Arabic loanwords, indicative of the language's fundamental Bantu nature. Kiswahili served as coastal East Africa's lingua franca and trade language from the ninth century onward. Zanzibari traders' intensive push into the African interior from the late eighteenth century induced the adoption of Swahili as a common language throughout much of East Africa. Thus, Kiswahili is the most spoken African language, used by far more than just the Waswahili themselves.[11]
^"Swahili facts, information, pictures - Encyclopedia.com articles about Swahili". Encyclopedia.com. Retrieved 11 April 2017.
^PeopleGroups.org. "PeopleGroups.org - Coastal Swahili of Tanzania". peoplegroups.org.
^"2019 Kenya Population and Housing Census Volume IV: Distribution of Population by Socio-Economic Characteristics" (PDF). Kenya National Bureau of Statistics. Retrieved 2 May 2021.
^Inquérito Nacional aos Agregados Familiares sobre Condições de Vida: Resultados Gerais (in Portuguese). Maputo: Instituto Nacional de Estatística. 1998.
^Valeri, Marc (2007-07-01). "Nation-building and communities in Oman since 1970: The Swahili-speaking Omani in search of identity". African Affairs. 106 (424): 479–496. doi:10.1093/afraf/adm020. ISSN 1468-2621.
^"Popular African Languages in the United States". Akorbi. 2020-03-23. Retrieved 2021-07-24.
^PeopleGroups.org. "PeopleGroups.org - Central Swahili of Congo (Kinshasa)". peoplegroups.org. Retrieved 2021-07-24.
^"The People of the Swahili Coast". 23 March 2020.
^ abSpear, Thomas (2000). "Early Swahili History Reconsidered". The International Journal of African Historical Studies. 33 (2): 257–290. doi:10.2307/220649. ISSN 0361-7882. JSTOR 220649.
^Horton and Middleton, "The Swahili: The Social Landscape of a Mercantile Society." Wiley. 2000.
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