An update of Swahili bibliography and listing of articles of former issues of the Swahili Forum.

The essays offered here originated in a series of conference papers presented over the years at various professional meetings. In the time elapsed since the first of them was offered at the meeting ofthe UNESCO Commission on the History of Geographical Thought (1988), new important works on Swahili history and language have appeared which demonstrate a variety of productive approaches to the problems of Swahili cultural and ethnic history In a publication such as the Swahili Forum it may be appropriate to recognize the steps made, to acknowledge the advances achieved, and to identify the needs remaining John Middleton`s (1992) well-received book presents a thorough and authmitative analysis of the social, economic, and spatial structures which evolved in the international setting of the East African coast Jarnes de Vere Alien`s posthumously published study (1992) pursues the questions of historic identity of the Swahili and of the political styles developed in the process of interaction of Arab-Islamic and African elements of coastal culture The special role of Islam in the formation and dynamics of Swahili city-states` elites has been analyzed slightly earlier by Randall L Pouwels (1987) Pouwels also has addressed coastal historiography in a series of articles some of which are cited in the following essays The fundamental study of the Swahili language by Derek Nurse and Thomas Hinnebusch (1993) revises and elaborates the possibilities of relating the chronology of the development of Swahili to the history of the Bantu-speaking coastal societies, raised in the earlier works singly or jointly by Derek Nurse and Thomas Spear New editions of Swahili texts make available, sometimes for the first time, to African and Western scholars alike, the synchronic nanatives indispensable for historical accuracy of our interpretations (Omar & Frankl 1990, I olmacheva 1993)

Historical texts from the Swahili coast (Swahili-English): Upper Pokomo Elwana, Mwiini Bajuni Pate Amu, She la Matondoni, Mwani Asili ya Mphokomu Fumo Liongo A story. Proverbs and riddles Mashairi Saidi Haji talking about poetry. Kiteko, a story Verse by MA Abdulkadir, Women`s political songs. An old woman reminisces, Mbaraka Msuri, a hadithi. Ngano A story.

This lively poem, one of several hundred collected in Mombasa at the end of the nineteenth century by W.E T AYLOR thanks to Mwalimu SIKUJUWA bin ABDALLAH ai-BAIAWI (Frankl, 1993), is preserved in Volume Ill of the Taylor Papers, now in the library of the School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS) in London.. lt consists of two versions - both in Arabic script (SOAS MS 47754); the first (Section X, page 4) is probably in the hand of ABDALLAH bin RASHID and has fifteen stanzas, while the second (Section Z, page 161) is in the hand of Mwalimu SIKUJUWA (one of T AYLOR\'s two Swahili teachers) and has twenty-one stanzas .. The entire text of version X is to be found in Z, although not in the same order. Version Z has thus six additional stanzas, and we have had no hesitation in selecting it as the text for this article (the manuscript having been most probably commissioned by TAYLOR).

Für das Swahili liegt eine Menge zweisprachiger Worterbucher mit der Ausgangssprache Swahili vor, weniger in umgekehrter Richtung. Die ersten bedeutenden lexikographischen Arbeiten wurden von Missionar L. Krapf seit der Mitte des 19 Jahrhunderts vor allem in Mombasa durchgeführt. 1982 erschien sein Dicitonary of the Swahili Language. Inzwischen gibt es Wörterbucher mit den Zielsprachen Englisch, Deutsch, F ranzosisch, Russisch, Schwedisch, ltalienisch, Polnisch, Tschechisch, Gujerati, Japanisch, Arabisch und anderen.

‘Taarab’ is a popular music entertainment in East Africa whose origin is ‘contentiously’ given as Middle East. It is an art form imported to East Africa perhaps in the early years of the 1900s. Taraab has been ariedly looked at, but has generally been seen as a uniform body. This essay sets out to show that from its inception in East Africa, taarab has never been uniform as it started to develop its own characteristics and peculiarities as a performing art. It has been undergoing a number of changes in its musical and lyrical structures. It moved outward to become a popular music instead of being court music, and from being coastal music to being a music that has spread out to inland Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Burundi, thus approximating musical structures of these regions as it is assuming new roles and functions. Although in our description we do in passing refer to the whole body of the art complex ‘taarab’, it is on the lyric that we focus on. This article is written on the basis of findings from field work and library research that have been conducted from 2000 to date in a project entitled Local and Global Aspects of Taarab: A Popular Music Entertainment in East Africa, under the umbrella topic “Lokales Handeln in Afrika im Kontext globaler Einflüsse”, funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).

This paper discusses Standard Kiswahili honorifics in Nairobi. It used observation as a means of obtaining data in Nairobi where Standard Kiswahili is also spoken. It points out that honorifics are a chief politeness strategy across many discourse domains; Kiswahili honorifics are conspicuously used and seem easy to learn; honorifics complement other politeness strategies; they are used in both formal and informal encounters. This paper also argues that honorifics in expressing face sav-ing ideals in Kiswahili language have both a social and individual appeal. There is, therefore, a strong suggestion for social face and communal based politeness as opposed to individual polite-ness in Kiswahili. This paper observes that politeness and especially by means of honorifics makes a Kiswahili conversational encounter fruitful. The honorifics also help to define, redefine and sus-tain social strata that are used as a basis of expressing face-saving ideals and politeness in Kiswa-hili and hence contributing to less conflict in interaction and strengthening cohesion in society in question.

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.

Taarab is a style of music performed all along the Swahili coast at weddings and on other celebratory occasions. It is arguably the most important type of entertainment music played in this region, and it is certainly prevalent in Zanzibar, where it has come to be considered part of the very characterisation of the island itself: this is the island of cloves, the island of slaves and `the island of tawab` (Seif Salim Saleh, lecture at the African Music Village Holland Park, London, July 18, 1985)

There are many different traditional costumes in the world. In Zanzibar, a Swahili man is said to be fully attired when he puts on an embroidered cap, locally known as kofia ya viua or just kofia, robe (kanzu) with a coat, and sandals taking a Swahili name of makubadhi. The Kofia is round-shaped with a flat top, adorned with embroidered designs all over For convenience of simplicity in classification kofia are divided into two main groups, simple designed and complex-designed caps.