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The language situation in Tanzania has changed greatly since the overwhelming spread of Swahili, the national language and one of the official languages of Tanzania. Previous studies have reported that Swahili has encroached on the domains of ethnic community languages (Legère 1992, Meka- cha 1993, Yoneda 1996), and its linguistic influence can easily be recognized throughout the ethnic community languages of Tanzania, even in remote areas. This situation has been described as ‘Swahilization’ of ethnic community languages (Yoneda 2010) or ‘language drift’ (Brenzinger & Marten 2016), as opposed to a clear language shift. This study describes the influence of Swahili on Tanzanian ethnic community languages, presenting specific examples to substantiate the previous studies (e.g. Yoneda 2010, Marten & Petzell 2016, Rosendal & Mapunda 2017, among others). It shows that the language shift that Batibo (1992) expected has not taken place. Instead, people have kept their ethnic community languages, developing a new type of language use to enable meaning-making for the community in this changing world. The ongoing process in an ethnic community consists of Swahilization of their language, rather than its disappearance through a complete shift away from its use. In addition, the influence of language contact between Swahili and ethnic community languages is not a one-way effect; Swahili is also affected by the various ethnic community languages. As a result, each language is forced to undergo ‘-ization’ by the other and their differences are, not only sociolinguistically but also structurally and lexically convergent.

The Kikae dialect is a regional variety of Swahili spoken in the southern part of Unguja, the largest island of the Zanzibar archipelago. In this dialect, the morpheme -wa preceded by a subject prefix, which agrees with the subject in person or noun class, is used as a copula. This form is used in neither Standard Swahili nor the Kiunguja dialect considered prestigious dialects of Swahili. In this paper, I describe the morphological and semantic characteristics of this copula, which have not been observed in previous studies, and propose a possible grammaticalisation path of the copula based on its synchronic properties and typological evidence. The following three claims will be made: 1. the subject prefix -wa morphologically corresponds to the perfect form, but does not encode a prior event unlike the perfect form of other verbs. 2. The use of the subject prefix -wa copula is restricted to ‘predicational sentences’. 3. It is highly probable that the subject prefix -wa has grammaticalized from a locative verb

Several studies have described emotional expressions used by speakers from different linguistic and cultural areas all around the world. It has been demonstrated that there are universal cognitive bases for the metaphorical expressions that speakers use to describe their emotional status. There are indeed significant differences concerning the use of emotional expressions, not only across languages but also language-internally. Quite a number of studies focus on the language of emotions in several European languages and languages of West Africa, whereas not enough research has been done on this regard on Eastern African languages

This paper presents an edited version of a handwritten 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 wrote 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.