Description

A STANDARD ENGLISH – SWAHILI DICTIONARY : This Dictionary is founded on the Madan’s original Swahili Dictionaries. It contains not only equivalent English words, but also short explanations in Swahili words, phrases and idioms occurring in modern English. Many definitions and examples contained in this work are identical with those in Madan’s dictionaries, but others have been revised and both the English vocabulary and the Swahili equivalents and definitions have been considerably augmented. The arrangementts adopted is aimed at assisting the Swahili speaker in establishing the connection between the different parts of speech in English.

Swahili, also known as Kiswahili (translation: coast language), is a Bantu language and the first language of the Swahili people. It is a lingua franca of the African Great Lakes region and other parts of eastern and south-eastern Africa, including Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Mozambique, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Comorian, spoken in the Comoros Islands is sometimes considered to be a dialect of Swahili, though other authorities consider it a distinct language.

Estimates of the total number of Swahili speakers vary widely, from 50 million to over 100 million. Swahili serves as a national language of four nations: Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, and the DRC. Shikomor, the official language in Comoros and also spoken in Mayotte (Shimaore), is related to Swahili. Swahili is also one of the working languages of the African Union and officially recognised as a lingua franca of the East African Community.

A significant fraction of Swahili vocabulary derives from Arabic through contact with Arabic-speaking Muslim inhabitants. For example, the Swahili word for “book” is kitabu, traceable back to the Arabic word كتاب kitābu (from the root k.t.b. “write”). However, the Swahili plural form of this word (“books”) is vitabu, following Bantu grammar in which ki- is reanalysed as a nominal class prefix