Background

Swahili is the major and most rapidly expanding Eastern African lingua franca, spoken by well over 50 million people, the official language (together with English) of Tanzania and a national language in Kenya, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, medium of instruction and/or subject matter in education up to secondary school level, widely used in politics, creative writing, in media, newspapers and music, with a literary tradition going back to the 18th century, and with aspirations to continental hegemony in Africa. In Tanzania, with the emergence of the movement for political independence, the Swahili language became the symbol of national unity in the struggle for independence (Uhuru) and in Julius Nyerere's African socialist experiment (Ujamaa).

The presence of Swahili on the internet reflects its role as a major competitor for media audiences in Eastern Africa and beyond, as witnessed by the extent of its use on both national and international broadcasts (e.g. Voice of America, BBC, Deutsche Welle) and as attested also by a number of daily newspaper links.

Swahili culture - albeit a somewhat disputed notion (Mazrui and Shariff 1994) - represents an original set of values, lifestyles and artistic production. It developed its particular characteristics from a unique blend of the Arab/Moslem and the traditional African world during a period of contact and symbiosis extending over more than a millenium. The study of the Swahili language opens access to a vast and dynamic artistic universe, including poetry, dance and music.

The formal accreditation of Swahili as a working language in panafrican institutional settings such as the African Union, and its popularity as a subject of academic teaching at African universities (e.g. at the universities of Capetown, of Ghana and Ivory Coast) are symbolic for its potential role in promoting an ideology of "decolonisation of the mind"(Ngugi wa Thiongo) across the continent. While no one would seriously expect (nor perhaps want) Swahili to dispute the dominant role of European world languages in international communication, it cannot be denied that it has achieved the status of a language of scientific writing for its own academic community in such areas as linguistics, literary criticism and social sciences, as witnessed by a growing body of specialized publications in these areas.

From the angle of its socio-political significance, Swahili is listed among the so-called "critical languages" identified by the U.S. Department of Education (D. Crystal, Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 1987:342). Curricula in African linguistics all over the world generally make Swahili a favorite subject at undergraduate level, and in some cases - as at the University of Bayreuth - promote its study to a fully-fledged subject leading to a Master in Swahili language and literature.

As a specimen of the world's languages, Swahili provides a prototypical illustration of an agglutinative language (Crystal 1987:293). Its nominal class and pervasive agreement system is representative for the 300 or more Bantu languages (among which Lingala, Xhosa, Zulu, etc.). Yet, due to the regularity of its morphology and the relative simplicity of its phonology, Swahili does not oppose insurmountable difficulties to the learner approaching it from a European language background.