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.