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Swahili
Definitions
- 1 An agglutinative language of the Bantu branch widely spoken in East Africa. Born in its modern form from the hybridization of the Arabic and Bantu cultures, it was the language of the traders in East Africa, and spread along the routes of trade.
"On Tuesday night at the Club Serene in Brooklyn, Mayor Koch proclaimed Kwanzaa Week in New York. Then he told the crowd of about 400 that he had practiced his Swahili in order to pronounce correctly such exotic-sounding words as kujichagulia (self-determination), ujamaa (cooperative economics) and imani (faith), the theme of Kwanzaa '83."
- 1 A member of various ethnic groups — mainly Bantu, Afro-Arab and Comorian — inhabiting the Swahili coast.
"The Swahilis are a unique and important community that began to form before the arrival of Islam, as a result of intermarriage between Arab traders who came to the coast and women from local ethnic groups."
- 2 the most widely spoken Bantu languages; the official language of Kenya and Tanzania and widely used as a lingua franca in east and central Africa wordnet
Etymology
Borrowed from Swahili Mswahili / Kiswahili, from Arabic سَوَاحِلِيّ (sawāḥiliyy, “(people) of the coasts”), from سَوَاحِل (sawāḥil, “coasts”), broken plural of سَاحِل (sāḥil, “coast”).
Borrowed from Swahili Mswahili / Kiswahili, from Arabic سَوَاحِلِيّ (sawāḥiliyy, “(people) of the coasts”), from سَوَاحِل (sawāḥil, “coasts”), broken plural of سَاحِل (sāḥil, “coast”).
See also for "swahili"
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