Reasons to learn - Swahili.

Personal update - I have now been in Cairo studying Egyptian Arabic for a month, with a month of classes left. If you follow me on twitter (@languageblog1) then you will know that I have got a job in Saudi Arabia, so hopefully I will be moving there in September.

I have already started looking at Arabic classes in Saudi Arabia so that I can continue my studies, although it will obviously be a different dialect of Arabic. The new plans also mean that I will be returning to the UK for a while after my Egyptian classes finish. During that down time in the UK I will take up another short challenge, which I have alluded to in my tweets. It's not a very serious challenge, but I feel like it will be a lot of fun.

Anyway, Swahili!

I'm not going to include a little description of Swahili, because I am assuming you have heard of it. I might be wrong, but I assumed it with the French post and everything worked out fine.



LOADS of people speak Swahili.

It's hard to get an exact number of speakers, but officially 15 million people speak it as a first language. But, then a further 140 million people speak it as a second language. This number changes depending on the website you look at. The amount of speakers is due to it being an official language in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. It is also one of the official language of the African Union.

Since there are about 1.1 billion people in Africa, you have about a one in ten chance of running into a Swahili speaker, should you find yourself in that part of the world.

The beautiful places Swahili is spoken.

If Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania weren't already on your list of countries to visit, then they should be now. Swahili is spoken in some of the most beautiful countries on earth, and for me the language is a reflection of the country it is spoken in. Beautiful country = Beautiful language.




The Bantu Language Family.

There are a lot of great reasons to learn Swahili, but for me this is the greatest. Swahili resides in the Bantu language family, which is a collection of at least 250 African languages, with a total of around 210 million speakers! Most of these languages are very closely related, with almost identical grammar rules, similar (and shared) vocabulary, and with a large amount of mutual intelligibility (speakers from different language can understand each other).

So, if I was going to learn Swahili (and I intend to) it would be with the intention of then moving on to other Bantu languages with a significant learners advantage. Some of these languages should sound familiar to you. Xhosa (Nelson Mandela's first language), Zulu, Lingala, Shona (which on its own has about 10 million native speakers), Kinyarwanda and Kirundi.

Just like you might learn French with the intention of then studying other Romance languages e.g. Italian, Swahili is very much the toe in the shallow end of the African language pool.

 

Interesting features.

Swahili has quite a few interesting features that you might not be aware of. Here are just two. Although Swahili now uses the Latin script, it was first written in a modified Arabic script (much like Urdu and Pashto are today). The earliest Swahili documents from 1711 AD are written in Arabic script, and was mainly due to the adoption of the language by merchants from Oman and Persia. It was changed to the Latin script in the 1800s by European colonial powers.

Repeating a word can change the meaning or intensity. For example, 'piga' means 'strike', but 'piga piga' means 'strike repeatedly'. 'Soma' means 'to read', but 'somasoma' means 'to read a little' or 'to read repeatedly'. It's a pretty useful grammatical feature which is consistent through most Bantu languages.



It's pretty easy.

Swahili is thought to be the easiest African language for English speakers to learn. The grammar is easy, the vocabulary is familiar (sometimes), and there aren't any tones (unlike many other African languages).

Allow me to demonstrate the simple grammar.

Ni = I
Na = Present tense
Soma = to read.
Ni + na + soma = I+am+reading.
Nina-soma = I am reading.

Easy peasy.

Ni = I
Li = Past tense
Soma = to read.
Ni + li + soma = I+was+reading.
Nili-soma = I was reading.

Lupita Nyong'o.



While researching for this post I found a great set of 65 PDF Swahili lessons by the University of Kansas, which you can access here.

Endangered languages you could actually learn! - PART 1

EDIT - It takes a really long time to research the resources for each language. I had intended this to be a long post with maybe a couple dozen endangered languages, but it turns out that it would take far too long. So this will be PART 1, and I will write later installments to pick up where I left off.

I don't know why, but the idea of learning an endangered language is very interesting to me. Something about being part of such an exclusive club, or something about the in-depth culture which is rarely found with larger languages.

I know that a lot of other people are interested in learning an endangered language for various reasons, and so I thought I would find a whole bunch of endangered languages and then point you to the resources with which to learn them.

Aleut.



Aleut is part of the Eskimo-Aleut family, and is native to Alaska (specifically, the Aleutian, Pribilof and Commander Islands).
How many people speak Aleut you ask? A 2007 study estimated that only 100-300 people still speak it in the world today. But, don't worry. Due to a long and consistent fascination in the language (mainly by Russian missionaries), there are a lot of places to go and learn Aleut.

The University of Alaska publishes an Aleut grammar book, a conversational CD set and textbook, dictionary, and stories written in Aleut for the more advanced learner. Due to the low batch numbers they are quite expensive, but you could buy them all for less than the price of Rosetta Stone Spanish.

Paakantyi.



Paakantyi is an Australian aboriginal language spoken around the Darling river. Here's another fun fact. Only 2 people speak it in the world!! If you learnt Paakantyi you would be in an exclusive club of 3 members. You would also be absorbing an important piece of Australian heritage.

I had to look really hard to find anything significant in terms of resources. As you would imagine, there isn't a lot of material about a language with 2 speakers.

I found out that a school in New South Wales wrote a textbook about Paakantyi, and being a small school they would probably be open to sending you a copy if you contacted them.

The Alliance for Linguistic Diversity has an online grammar book, but you need to request permission to view it. There is also a grammar book written by Luise Anna Hercus in 1993. I can't find a copy for sale, but there is a copy in the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Library and the Wentworth Shire Library.

 Taa.



 Taa is a language with about 4,200 speakers spread across Namibia and Botswana. Unfortunately, if you google 'Taa' you tend to get results about the Texas Apartment Association.

Luckily this is one language that the Alliance for Linguistic Diversity has quite a few resources for. They have videos showing the pronunciation, videos documenting the language, and documents about vocabulary and grammar (although the documents can be quite confusing).

Yup'ik.



Yup'ik is a another member of the Eskimo-Aleut language family. It is spread into various dialects, the most prominent of which is Central Alaskan Yup'ik. In total they boast about 19,000 speakers.  In 17 Alaskan villages children are still brought up with Yup'ik as their first language.

Once again, the University of Alaska has a wide choice of stories and conversational textbooks, mainly for Central Alaskan Yup'ik, but some for the other dialects as well.