At the core of this special issue lies an apparently simple question: What is Swahili Studies? The “critical” perspective entails a question about both epistemological foundations and different versions or notions of “Swahili Studies” – also mirrored in the many institutions teaching Swahili all over the globe. In the same vein, this special issue shows Swahili Studies not as a fixed discipline delimited by geographical, historical, and disciplinary boundaries, and defined canons, but as a subject of an ongoing conversation. The twelve contributions of this special issue deliberately take different perspectives on Swahili Studies: 1. Swahili Studies as mirrored in a variety of different global histories of institutionalization; 2. Critically reflecting upon the notion of “Swahili”, its problematic geographical and linguistic fixations; and 3. Considering the specifically critical role of Uswahili/Mswahili. The aim of this special issue is to hint at the dynamic notions of Swahili – difficult to delimit in clear-cut terms of geography, culture or linguistic parameters. The issue does not give fixed answers or definitions, rather it opens up the multiple possibilities that are of, and from within, Swahili Studies.

This paper is an epistemological and reflexive account of half a century of research on the Waswahili through the medium of Kiswahili. The first section asks who ‘we’ (scholars) think ‘they’ (subjects of research) are, showing how claims to Swahili identity vary according to historical, geographical and political contexts. It also points out the dangers of orientalism and exoticism and advocates the acknowledgement of the potential for local people to be fellow intellectuals. The second section discusses who ‘they’ (subjects of research) consider themselves to be and how the claiming of Swahili identity has shifted, again according to historical and geographical contexts. In the third section there is a consideration of who ‘they’ think ‘we’ scholars are, since the success of research depends a great deal on how local people perceive us, including by race, gender and education. Importantly, such success also depends on a number of credentials including fluent Kiswahili, knowledge of Islam and familiarity through multiple visits. The final section discusses who we researchers think we ourselves are, the purpose of our research and for whom we write about it. This raises questions around the ethics of research – taking and giving back data and acknowledging that the creation of knowledge is very much a joint venture between locals and researchers.

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

In this paper, I invoke a sociolinguistic approach to complement the historical record in order to examine the use of the word utumwa itself as it has changed to reveal distinct class and gender connotations especially in northem Swahili communities. To explore utumwa is difficult. There is no consensus with regard to what the word and its derivatives mean that applies consistently, yet it is clear that there has been a meaning shift since the nineteenth century. This paper examines the construction and transformation of a non-Westem-molded form of service in Africa. Oral traditions and terminological variation will be brought to bear on an analysis of utumwa `slavery, service` as an important concept of social change in East Africa and, in particular, on the northern Kenya coast What this term, its derivatives, and other terms associated with it have come to mean to Swahili speakers and culture bearers will be seen to mirror aspects of the history of Swahili-speaking people fi-om the 1Oth-11th century to the present.

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.

The political and economic problems of language policy in modern Africa have continued to remind us of the unforgettable historical fact of European colonialism. Today there are two major regions of Africa known as Anglo-phone and Franco-phone Africa. Much as many African leaders would have wished to discard the language of the former colonial power and substitute an indigenous language, this was problematic because in many cases there was not a single widely-spoken local language In some cases any attempt to raise the status of one indigenous language into a national language might have provoked wasteful inter-ethnic conflict.

Book Review: Mirza, Sarah & Margaret Strobel (ed.) 1989. Three Swahili Women. Life Histories from Mombasa. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. and Mirza, Sarah & Margaret Strobel (ed.) 1989. Wanawake watatu wa Kiswahili hadithi za maisha kutoka Mombasa, Kenya. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

It is heartening to note that the number of contemporary Swahili scholars whose work is receiving attention in books and university theses is steadily on the increase. This volume adds Abdilatif Abdalla to the list containing, so far as I know, the names of Muhammed Said Abdulla, Ebrahim Hussein and Euphrase Kezilahabi It is a volume on the poetry of Abdalla which Nyaigotti-Chacha writes with wrumth, understanding and a desire to place in perspective the poet`s works, in particular, Utenzi wa maisha ya Adamu na Hawaa (1971) and Sauti ya dhiki (1973) For this reason, perhaps, it tends to be less critical and more informative Nyaigotti--Chacha divides his work into four chapters. The first chapter introduces the reader to the author`s reasons for undertaking to Wiite it, originally his M A thesis at the University of Nairobi (1980) A bdefbut useful biography of Abdilatif Abdalla (ppJ-9), and a theoretical orientation to the author`s analysis of the works (pp 9--11) - socialistic in the Marxian mould - furnishes the reader with the background required fm a better understanding of what follows in the next two chapters which examine Utenzi and Sauti .. respectively The final chapter investigates the skills of Abdalla as a poet

The paper describes a computer system for testing the coherence and adequacy of dictionaries. The system suits also well for retiieving lexical material in context from computerized text archives Results are presented from a series of tests made with Kamusi ya Kiswahlli Sanifu (KKS), a monolingual Swahili dictionary.. The test of the intemal coherence of KKS shows that the text itself contains several hundreds of such words, for which there is no entry in the dictionary. Examples and frequency numbers of the most often occurring words are given The adequacy of KKS was also tested with a corpus of nearly one million words, and it was found out that 1.32% of words in book texts were not recognized by KKS, and with newspaper texts the amount was 2.24% The higher number in newspaper texts is partly due to numerous names occurring in news articles Some statistical results are given on frequencies of wordforms not recognized by KKS The tests shows that although KKS covers the modern vocabulary quite well, there are several ru·eas where the dictionary should be improved The internal coherence is far from satisfactory, and there are more than a thousand such rather common words in prose text which rue not included into KKS The system described in this article is au effective tool for `detecting problems and for retrieving lexical data in context for missing words.