‘The deaf, the blind and the lame: discrimination or respect?’ In this article we investigate what the assignment of these (and other) words to the KI-class means. We depart from the common explanation which says that the KI-class here signals contempt since it is not the typical class for human beings in Swahili. We then analyse the surprisingly large corpus of nouns referring to people in the KI-class and show how they got assigned to this class. This leads us to a more general statement about the meaning of a noun class. The final section is a case study of one particular word, kigego, and what it formerly stood for in Vuaso (Upare) and other societies bordering the Swahili world.

In this paper I discuss the distribution of the so-called stem marker -ku- in Swahili, which is found with some, mostly monosyllabic verbs when used with certain tense morphemes. After introducing the data, I show that there are three potential analyses to explain the data, which I discuss in turn. Two of these analyses are phonological in nature and relate the distribution of -ku- to stress assignment. The first stress related analysis, which I call the `prevent-stress`rule is popular in textbooks and teaching manuals of Swahili (e.g. Ashton 1944, Russell 1996, Maw 1999), but turns out to be wrong. According to the second, more satisfactory stress rule, first proposed by Meinhof (1910a, 1910b, 1933), -ku- is deleted throughout except in stressed syllables and before vowels. While this analysis provides a sufficient diachronic account of the distribution of -ku-, I provide an alternative synchronic analysis, according to which the distribution of -ku- results from a number of alternative lexical entries for the relevant verbs.

The present paper discusses the results of a survey conducted in order to receive an answer to the question posed in the title, i. e. how directives are formulated in Swahili in terms of the directness level of the utterance, considering the mutual relationship between the interactants. The data corpus on which I have based my study comes from 82 Swahili-speaking Tanzanian students.

Kiswahili hat ein doppeltes System der nominalen Klassifikation. Das erste System ist das aus dem Bantu (Niger-Congo) bekannte System der konkordierenden nominalen und \"pronominalen\" Präfixe; das zweite, jüngere System gründet sich auf das Bedeutungsmerkmal [belebt]. Die grammatische Kategorie NUMERUS (SINGULAR::PLURAL) gilt nur im zweiten System; innerhalb des ersten Systems ist die Bildung der Nominalpaare, z .B. mtulwatu, ein derivationeller Prozeß und bezieht Konkordanz sich ausschlieBlich auf die Kategorie KLASSE.

This paper presents a description of sentential negation in Kiswahili and attempts a partial analysis of sentential negation in Kiswahili within the Principles and Parameters framework, in particular, following Pollock\'s (1989) proposal to split IP into several functional categories including NegP. The main claim is that negation mruking in Kiswahili is an instance of negation projection, NegP. The main evidence for this is found in relative clauses and conditional clauses where negation blocks I -to-C movement. The paper is organized into 5 sections. Basic theoretical assumptions are outlined in Section 1. Section 2 presents a description of the basic facts about four strategies of expressing sentential negation in Kiswahili and highlights problems that the data raise. Section 3 discusses the interaction between negation and relative marker. In Section 4, the location of NegP in IP is proposed. Section 5 presents some general conclusions and summarizes questions for further research.

The aim of this paper is to show that Swahili has several strategies to resolve verbal agreement with conjoined noun phrases. In section 2, I give a brief summary of the situation as depicted in grammatical descriptions of Swahili. I then present a number of examples - mainly taken from Muhammed Said Abdulla`s (1976) novel Mwana wa Yungi hulewa - illustrating different strategies of agreement with conjoined NPs. In section 4, I present an analysis of one of the strategies discussed and argue that the choice of different strategies is not only based on dialect or speaker variation, but rather can be related to information structure and the dynamics of interpretation.

This article discusses one particular issue of Swahili standardization. which is, in Kiswahili Sanifu, the correct concordial agreement to be applied to the lexeme -ingine (‘other’)? Should it be treated like an adjective, as ‘classical’ works in Swahili grammar claim as well as current educational books do? How can efforts in favour of standardization comply with the appearance of different variants of concordial agreement?

Sign language in Tanzania is a relatively new field of linguistics that is yet to attract many researchers and linguists in particular Tanzanian Sign Language (TSL) functions as a unifying tool for the deaf in the country and, probably, beyond. This language, which is still at its early stage of development, is used in the same linguistic environment with Kiswahili, the national language, which is more established. The situation leaves TSL disadvantaged and is thus likely to cause a one-way linguistic influence, from Kiswahili to TSL. This paper, therefore, examines the nature and impact of the situation. Firstly, it focuses on the question of whether or not TSL is an independent language that has developed as a seperate language, quite distinct from the spoken languages of the communities that surround it, especially Kiswahili. Secondly, it examines the extent to which Kiswahili has influenced TSL and thus the role that the former plays in learning and developing the latter. The results of the study show that Kiswahili has had some influence on TSL but the influence is marginal at lexical level. Of all the signs studied, only 13% were directly related to Kiswahili. The majority of the signs studied were found to be iconic in nature, but only 12% of all signs were semantically transparent. Even in these cases where the signs are transparent, the transparency of the signs is not based on one`s knowledge of Kiswahili. Most of the transparent signs are common gestures that any person of any ethnic origin can interpret. The study has thus established that TSL is more of a sign language than signed language. It is an indigenous African sign language, unrelated to the Western Sign Languages, except for the manual alphabet. Finally, the study predicts that much of the transperancy and iconicity in TSL will gradually fade away as the language develops across time, space, and generations.

Swahili has a larger inventory of (more or less \"basic\") colour terms than most Bantu languages. The aim of this article is to present this colour terminology and to point out semantic, syntactic and morphological divergences. We also look at the etymology of the various colour terms and try to establish a chronology of the growth (and decline?) of Swahili colour terminology.

This paper speculates about the origin of the overall use of the form iko in Inland Swahili. Its functional scope comprises predication, identification, location, existence, and association. In Standard Swahili, the primary function of iko is to express the locative relation of nouns belonging to noun class 4 or 9. For the expression of identification various other means are used. As Inland Swahili is mostly acquired as a second language it will be argued here that the functional expansion of iko might be due to the crosslinguistic influence of the first language. However, first languages, such as Maasai, exhibit a formal distinction between location and predication. A conceptual merger of both functions in the second language is more likely to occur when the first language contains only one obligatory copula expressing both concepts. This obligatory copula can be found in many Indo-European languages, e.g. English or Hindi. Until today Indians speaking Swahili are characterised by the frequent usage of iko, a fact which points to the view that the overall use of iko could be due to substrate influence of Hindi.