Swahili Alphabet

Swahili, Kiswahili in the language itself, is written in the Latin alphabet with no accented or extra letters. Everything a Swahili writer needs is on an ordinary English keyboard. The letters in use are a b ch d e f g h i j k l m n o p r s t u v w y z: 24 in all, because c never stands alone and appears only in the pair ch, as in chai (tea) and chakula (food). Q and x are not used; borrowed words are respelled, so English taxi becomes teksi.

Spelling is close to perfectly regular: each letter or letter pair has one sound, and a word is read the way it is written. The five vowels a e i o u sound as in Spanish or Italian, and every vowel is pronounced, even when two meet: kuamua (to decide) has four syllables, ku-a-mu-a. Stress almost always falls on the second-to-last syllable, ki-SWA-hi-li, ha-BA-ri, which is why Swahili needs no accent marks to show it.

Standard spelling goes back to the Inter-Territorial Language Committee, set up in 1930 for the British East African territories, which took the dialect of Zanzibar, Kiunguja, as its base. Before the Latin alphabet arrived with 19th-century missionaries and colonial offices, Swahili had been written for centuries in Arabic script, known as Swahili Ajami; that script is still known on the coast, and its letters are in the Arabic collection.

Swahili pronunciation: ch, dh, gh, kh, ng’, ny, sh and th

The sounds that English learners ask about most are written as pairs of letters. ch is the ch of church: chai, chungwa (orange). sh is the sh of ship: shule (school), shamba (farm). ny is one sound, the ny of canyon and the ñ of Spanish: nyumba (house), nyama (meat), Nyerere.

th and dh are the two sounds of English th: th as in think, thelathini (thirty), thamani (value); dh as in this, dhahabu (gold), dhambi (sin). gh is a soft sound made at the back of the throat, close to a French r: ghali (expensive), ghafla (suddenly). kh, the ch of Scottish loch, turns up in a few Arabic loanwords such as kheri (good fortune); many speakers say it as h. Most words that begin with th, dh, gh or kh come from Arabic, which is why the words starting with these pairs are such a common search.

ng’ with an apostrophe is the ng of singer, a single nasal sound: ng’ombe (cow), ng’ambo (the other side, abroad). Without the apostrophe, ng is the ng of finger, with a g you hear: ngoma (drum, dance), nguo (clothes). The apostrophe is the only thing that tells the two apart. M and n before another consonant begin many words, mbuzi (goat), ndizi (banana), njia (path), nzuri (good), and a lone m can be a whole syllable: mtu (person) is m-tu, mzee (elder) is m-ze-e. Unlike some neighbouring languages, Swahili keeps r and l apart: rafiki (friend), lala (sleep).

The apostrophe of ng’ and Swahili punctuation

The apostrophe is the one mark Swahili needs that English seldom uses inside a word. It belongs to the spelling of ng’ombe, ng’ambo, ng’oa (pull out) and ning’inia (hang), and leaving it out turns the word into a different sound. Both the straight ' and the curly ’ are seen; they look alike to a reader but are different characters to a search engine, so keep one throughout names and titles.

Other punctuation follows English: full stop, comma, question mark and curly double quotes “ ” for speech, as in Alisema, “Karibu sana.” (He said, "You are very welcome.")

There is no single Unicode character for these currencies: the Tanzanian, Kenyan and Ugandan shillings (shilingi) use multi-letter symbols, and the Congolese, Rwandan and Burundian francs use their own ISO codes. Prices are written with letter abbreviations, TSh 5,000, KSh 500, USh 10,000, or with the ISO codes TZS, KES and UGX.

How to type Swahili on a keyboard or phone

No special Swahili keyboard is needed for the letters: an English US or UK layout types every word, and the straight apostrophe of ng' is the key next to Enter. The only characters you may want beyond the keys are the curly marks. On Windows, hold Alt and type 0146 on the number pad for ’, and 0147 and 0148 for “ ”. On a Mac, Option+Shift+] gives ’, and Option+[ and Option+Shift+[ give “ ”.

On an iPhone, Smart Punctuation (Settings → General → Keyboard) turns ' into ’ and " into curly quotes as you type. Android keyboards such as Gboard list Kiswahili among their languages, which adds word suggestions and spell-check. In HTML, ’ is ’ and “ ” are “ and ”. Searches for a Swahili Ajami or Arabic keyboard are about the older Arabic-script spelling, which uses a standard Arabic layout.

Swahili greetings and everyday phrases

Greetings matter in Swahili, and they come in question-and-answer pairs. Habari? (literally "news?") or Habari yako? (how are you?) is answered Nzuri (good) or Salama (peaceful, fine), and the time of day can be added: Habari za asubuhi? in the morning. Hujambo? (any trouble with you?) gets Sijambo (no trouble). Jambo! is the short, friendly hello that visitors learn first, and young people in towns greet each other with Mambo?, answered Poa! (cool).

To elders, especially in Tanzania, the respectful greeting is Shikamoo, and the elder replies Marahaba. Karibu (welcome) is heard everywhere, Asante sana is thank you very much, Pole says sorry or offers sympathy, pole pole means slowly, and Kwaheri is goodbye. Hakuna matata, there are no problems, is everyday Swahili long before it was a song. A birthday wish is Heri ya siku ya kuzaliwa!, happiness on the day of birth.

Where Swahili is spoken

Swahili is the great shared language of East Africa. It is the national language of Tanzania and Kenya and an official language there with English; one of the four national languages of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with Lingala, Kikongo and Tshiluba; an official language of Uganda and, since 2017, of Rwanda; and widely spoken in Burundi. It is an official language of the East African Community and a working language of the African Union.

Unicode's CLDR estimates about 194 million speakers in all, most of whom speak it as a second language alongside their own: some 61 million in Tanzania, 58 million in DR Congo, 38 million in Kenya and 37 million in Uganda, with smaller communities in Somalia, Mozambique, Burundi, Mayotte and South Africa. These are estimates, and counts of second-language speakers differ widely.

Swahili is a Bantu language that grew up in the trading towns of the Indian Ocean coast, and its name comes from the Arabic sawāḥil, coasts. Many of its words are Arabic, and some come from Persian, Portuguese, Hindi and English. Its closest relatives are the Comorian languages, with their own Ngazidja Comorian and Ndzwani Comorian collections; other Bantu neighbours with collections include Kikuyu, Sukuma, Ganda, Kinyarwanda, Rundi and Lingala, and the Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, DR Congo, Rwanda and Burundi collections gather each country's flag and emoji.