Swahili

High school (ages 12+)
People & Society

Name:

Date:

Step 1 · Read the article

Open the article and read it at the level above. Then answer the questions below in your own words.

https://smallwhale.org/articles/swahili

Write what each word means, using the article.

Do not copy the article. Write two things you learned, the way you would explain them to a friend.

Answers below are taken from the article’s stored facts, so they match what the student read.

1. What is the language family?Bantu (Niger-Congo), with significant lexical borrowing from Arabic, Persian, Portuguese, and English
2. What is the estimated speaker population?Over 100 million speakers, encompassing both native (Waswahili) and second-language speakers
3. What is Swahili and where does it come from?Swahili is a Bantu language spoken in East Africa. It grew from Bantu roots and added many Arabic words because of trade and contact with Arab traders.
4. Why do many words in Swahili come from Arabic?Arab traders brought new words when they traded along the East African coast. Swahili borrowed these words and mixed them with its own grammar.

Lingua Franca: A language systematically used to communicate between people of different native languages.
Bantu Languages: A major subgroup of the Niger-Congo language family, characterized by a system of noun classes and agglutination.
Lexicon: The vocabulary of a language or a branch of knowledge.