Advanced Swahili students as well as teachers of Swahili will surely appreciate the new German Swahili - Handbook published recently. This handbook fills a gap in Swahili teaching materials. Thirteen authors, each of them being a specialist in the given Swahili field, have been collectively working on the volume.

There are two matters for us to consider.The first is that of the association of Alhamisi with religious connotations and if that is only specific to Kiswahili language (community); and the second is if the borrowing of Alhamisi is linguistically well motivated even for that purpose. For both these matters, we shall be comparing the Kiswahili calendar with that of its neighbours to determine what we think is a discrepancy, especially, with the Kiswahili borrowing of Alhamisi. We shall discuss the issues above and others in this paper as follows. In the following section we shall, briefly, consider the basis of the formulation of some week calendars.This will be followed by the consideration of the week calendars of a number of languages in East Afiica. Lastly, we shall focus specifically on the Kiswahili week calendar; comparing it with the others and drawing our conclusion.

This thesis provides a detailed study of the semantics, grammar, and pragmatics of positional verbs from a typological perspective in Gurenɛ, a Gur (Niger-Congo) language spoken in Northern Ghana. The study documents and describes Gurenɛ positional verbs in detail focusing on a set of over thirty contrastive positional verbs using a documentary corpus of natural and stimuli-based elicited data. “Positional verbs” is used in this study as a cover term that refers to a class of verbs that semantically encode the static assumed body posture or position of animate entities (humans and animals) or the static location of inanimates (objects) in space. The study discusses the Gurenɛ data in the context of recent cross-linguistic studies on posture, positional and locative verbs (Newman 2002a; Levinson & Wilkins 2006a, Ameka & Levinson 2007a) which suggest that some languages employ verbs rather than adpositions to describe locations. It compares the Gurenɛ data to these typological studies to establish the similarities and the differences of the semantics of these verbs. Like other languages observed in these studies, the use of verbs in the Gurenɛ locative construction is obligatory and the verbs constitute the main linguistic means that the speakers use for locative descriptions. The thesis further explores in part, the basic locative construction (BLC) typology of Levinson & Wilkins (2006a) and Ameka & Levinson (2007a). The BLC typology is concerned with the use of verbs in languages to express spatial locative information with the claim that languages can be classified into four main types according to the number and types of verbs used in their BLC; Type 0 (no verb), Type I (one locative verb or a copula), Type II (three to seven postural verbs), and Type III (seven to +100 positional verbs). In Gurenɛ over thirty verbs are identified that can be used in its BLC. As a result, Gurenɛ is classified as a Type III language. Like any other Type III language, as predicted by the BLC typology, the language uses its verbs to describe a wide range of precise semantic notions involving different locative relations between the Figure and the Ground such as body position, elevation, attachment, containment, distribution, and relative distance. The findings among others suggest that in a locative scene where the Ground is elevated more specific verbs of elevation with very precise meanings associated with the Figure’s properties which include stable base support, shape, and position are used. Additionally, the Ground elevation disregards the actual posture of the Figure. Thus, if a speaker observes a Figure on the ground (earth or floor level) the actual posture verb is used, but if the Figure is on an elevated Ground (e.g., a tabletop, a rooftop) the actual posture is disregarded. This “elevation” phenomenon has not been fully discussed in the cross-linguistic studies of the positional and locative verbs in the semantic literature. The Gurenɛ data make a contribution toward clarification of the range and type of distinctions to be accounted for in the semantic typology of the use of these verbs in locative descriptions.

The aim of this study is to illustrate the state of-the art of technical tools which allow the user to build the lexicon of a Swahili text. Different kinds of statistical information can also be extracted from the text with the aid of tailor made software. The basic operation in building the lexicon of a text is lemmatization, i. e extracting the lemma from the forms contained in the text. Once the lemma list is ready it can be converted into a list of entties, to be filled according to selected criteria.

This paper presents an edited version of a hand written text in Shaba Swahili and French, accompanied by an English translation. The original text was written in ballpoint by a Shaba Zairean ex-houseboy, and sent to his former employer in Belgium It provides an account of his life, with special focus on the period after his Belgian employers left Zaire in 1973. It documents the conditions of hardship in the life of a semi-educated Zairean and provides a detailed account of the migrations he has to undertake in order to find means to support himself and his family. The author Wiote the `recit` at the request of the former employer`s wife, as a symbolic way to repay the debt he had incurred over the years in which he had received money and other goods from the Belgian lady. The text was sent to me by the former employer, who asked me to translate it into Dutch. The former employer granted me the permission to edit and publish the text in its totality. For reasons of privacy, we decided to alter the names of the people mentioned in the text. Thus, for instance, the employer is named Andni Deprins, his wife (who is the central addressee of the text) Helena Arens, and the author of the text is identified as Julien.

This overview paper aims to present general approaches to variation in Swahili, both from a structural/typological and from a sociolinguistic angle. Recently, building upon earlier dialectological studies of Swahili, varieties in the periphery have been the focus of scholarly attention, as well as urban dialects from East Africa and Swahili in the diaspora. This introductory paper intends to summarize some of the approaches and directions that address the geographical and sociolinguistic diversity of Swahili, studied from different angles. These include both traditional approaches (descriptive sketches, dialectological and dialectometrical analyses, lexicostatistics etc.) and more recent directions in Bantu studies, such as micro-parametric analysis in the field of microvariation. Moreover, current (socio)linguistic trends are discussed, which mostly deal with language contact, diversity and change in touristic settings, in relation to new media, and in regard to youth language practices, or with new approaches to urban fluidity such as metrolingualism and translanguaging. In this contribution, we aim to give an overview of current trends in the study of Swahili by analyzing processes of linguistic and scholarly diversification and variation in the Swahili-speaking world.

Focused on Pemba Island in Zanzibar, this paper examines how talk about food – in abundance and plenty as well as drought, and hardship – can yield important insights into people’s experiences of the past and present. While food, in a very basic way, is central to human survival, people’s experiences of acquiring, preparing, sharing, and consuming food are central aspects of human social and cultural life. When talking about food, human beings deploy culturally specific knowledge that locates them in history and in society. Food discourse deploys culturally inflected visions of wellness and social harmony, as well as of hardship and fragmentation. This paper explores food discourse in Pemba as oral history that sheds light on how people experienced the 1920s and 1930s, World War II and rationing, the Zanzibar Revolution and the famine of 1972, as well as how changes in food preparation figure in people’s assessments of their own well-being, and experiences of contemporary times. The paper also argues that the Pemban concept of shibe, or ‘satiety’, may provide a culturally viable framework for thinking about as well as implementing social and environmental wellbeing on a larger scale.

This paper attempts an analysis of Ebrahim Hussein’s drama Mashetani through a critical approach based on the dimension of horror. Despite the pervasive strength of this element in Mashetani, it has rarely been considered as anything more than a mere stylistic element in a vision of this drama which approaches its contents only, using allegory. In this study, Mashetani will be read from a different point of view, which sees the horrific element as bearer of new contents and new subjects not always reachable through an allegorical interpretation, in order not only to make a contribution to literary criticism of this drama, but also to emphasize how horror can acquire an analytic function besides its stylistic role.

This paper examines the perceptions of Kenyans towards the way other Kenyans speak Swahili from a Folklinguistic perspective. The study involved two main tasks. In the first task, informants were provided with blank maps of the country and asked to identify areas where they thought there was a distinct way of speaking Swahili. In the second task, they were provided with the same map showing Kenyan’s eight provinces and asked to rank them in terms of correctness, attractiveness and closeness to the way they speak Swahili. The results show little or no difference between the rankings of correctness versus pleasantness of Swahili varieties. The study also shows that Kenyans do not identify with the normative variety modeled on the standardized or Kenyan coastal Swahili which is used in the schools or mass media. Similar to other studies in perceptual dialectology, the informants’ judgments were influenced by their background knowledge and stereotypes about different regions that have little or no relationship with linguistics factors per se. Unlike other studies in perceptual dialectology however, languages that are not the object of study have a strong influence on respondents’ perceptions. Beside the ethnic stereotypes that characterize Kenya’s multilingual discourse, Kenyans’ attitudes towards varieties of Swahili seem to be filtered through the lens of a competitive hegemonic language that has enjoyed historical advantage. As a result, the promotion of an idealized variety of Swahili in light of the dominance of English and the continued use of local languages is not likely to increase its acceptability as a national and official language.

Although a textual relationship between Arabic Muslim texts and their rendition through Swahili epic poems (tendi) is acknowledged in Swahili poetry studies, “translation” is not a straightforward explanation of this relationship. Furthermore, Swahili narrative poems on the prophets (manabii), mostly created at the end of the 19th century, have seldom been considered in textual relation to the Qiṣaṣ al-Anbiyā’ literature or to the Qur’ān. Thus, important questions have not been asked: How did the Arabic stories of the prophets arrive on the Swahili coast? How did poets appropriate these stories and forge them into a new narrative discourse? In this paper, I focus on tafsiri as a form of appropriation and adaptation, applying Gérard Genette’s concept of “palimpsest” to analyse the textual relationship between Arabic Muslim and Swahili literary texts. This will allow me, through a close reading of these texts and consideration of both language and genre, to identify the palimpsestuous presence or rather copresence of Arabic source texts within Swahili works. Ultimately, this method offers a model for future philologies of world literature.