Swahili Translation

• With many countries in Eastern and Central Africa, such as Kenya, showing massive growth specifically in telecommunications and IT &technology, the demand for Swahili translations is skyrocketing.
  
  
• Swahili is the most widely spoken language of Eastern Africa.
  
  
• Swahili is natively spoken by around 5 million and an additional 135 million as a second language.
  
  
• Swahili is an official and national language of Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya, and is used as a lingua franca throughout East Africa. Swahili serves as a national language of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where it is spoken in the five eastern provinces, and overall almost half of the population speaks it.
  
  
• Swahili is also widely spoken in Burundi, Mayotte, Mozambique, Oman, Rwanda, Somalia, South Africa, Uganda, UAE, and the USA.
  
  
• Swahili is not spoken only in East and Central Africa. Due to immigration and increased travel of people to different parts of the world, Swahili-speaking people are to be found in many other parts of the world.
  
  
• Long-time interactions with other people bordering the Indian Ocean spread the Swahili language to distant places such as on the islands of Comoro and Madagascar and beyond, reaching South Africa, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates as well.
  
  

More Interesting Facts

• The name “Swahili” comes from the Arabic word سواحل meaning “coastal dwellers.”
  
  
• Swahili includes a lot of vocabulary of Arabic origin as a result of contact with Arabic-speaking traders and inhabitants of the Swahili Coast.
  
  
• There are also words in Swahili borrowed from German, Portuguese, English, Hindi, and French due to contact with traders and colonial officials.
  
  
• Arab and Persian cultures had a great impact on the Swahili culture and the Swahili language.
  Swahili used to be written using Arabic script, which was later replaced by the Latin script and became a standard.