In a paper which appeared two years ago, I outlined some of the main features of the contemporary taarab world in Zanzibar, which is undergoing great changes due to economic, social and cultural factors (Aiello Traoré 2004a). A recent development that I highlighted is the vanishing of women\'s taarab clubs. The greater participation of women within the groups of taarab asilia has strated, in my view, an interesting confrontation between the tendency of conversation of the codes which are identified as \"traditional\" and the innovations proposed by female members in music and performance, as well as in the production of lyrics, an area where many women are now regularly involved. I will concentrate my analysis on the taarab lyrics being composed by Zanzibari women, which are of great interest because of the variety of cultural and social backgrounds, themes, techniques and poetical sensitivities.

In contrast to the \'classical Islamic tendi\' where the action as well as the setting is commonly detached from the environmental context of the Swahili coast, the Liyongo poems show an abundance of detailed descriptions and enumerative reviews of material items crucial and characteristic of the particular East African shares of Swahili culture. Frequently reference is also made to the natural environment as plants and their fruits play a prominent role as requisits of both the Swahili natural and cultural setting. Apart from being exploited as central requisite and being referred to as material source in the poems, plants are also extensively used for similes. The Liyongo poems are full of culturally metaphors which are context-dependent and sometimes render the text rather obscure. Without denying that there is, of course, also contemporary poetry employing plants as subject matter or metaphors, in this article I focus on two thematically close poems which we vaguely have to classify as \"old\" while not being able to give exact dates. Although the article suggests to be a thematic view on Swahili poetry, it is primarily a text edition of two poems, the \"Song of the Mjemje\" and the \"Shairi la Mtambuu\", which are both presented together with a critical apparatus.

Remarks on aspects of taarab such as its history, nature, definition, and change appear prominently and repeatedly in nearly every previous study of the subject. Some of these remarks, however, serve more to expose a clash of interests rather than provide untainted facts about its conceptualisation. This esseay aims at revisiting the notion of taarab in an attempt to concretise its conceptualisation on the basis of various variables that affect change in its structure. The relevant variables are convergence, divergence, linguistic constrains, formal conventions, spontaneity and preparedness in composition, actualisation and performance, instrumentation (i. e. number of instruments and how they are played), the art of vocalisation, the performer/ audience divide, stage organisation, setting, occasion, functions and media influences. For the purpose of avoiding much attention to every category of taarab, however, we prefer to take `group-styles`- hence our concentration on three phases: the period of the inception of taarab in Zanzibar, the period prior to 1905 through the 1920s up to the 1940s when the phonograph record and then the sound film was introduced, from the 1950s to the 1960s when the radio was introduced, and from the 1970s todate - the period of the impact of the tape-recorder, video-recorder, TV - and most recently the period of the influence of satellite television. Our analysis is based on theoretical conceptions of genres by Dubrow (1982), Fowler (1991), Finnegan (1976) and Okpewho (1992) in written literature and `orature`.

Book review: In 2004 the long awaited second edition of the Standard Swahili - Swahili Dictionary, edited by the Insitute of Kiswahili Research (TUKI) at the University of Dar es Salaam, appeared. With this publication TUKI has once again confirmed its leading role in the field of Swahili lexicography in East Africa. it is up to date, containing new words and phrases which are in use in East Africa in order to cope with the development in science and technology, society, economics and globalization.

Le titre de notre article est une formulation métaphorique de la problématique qui est discutée, partant du principe qu´un des fondements d´une vie de couple harmonieuse est une bonne enente entre les partenaires.

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.

Ist das Swahili eine Tempus- oder eine Aspektsprache? Bei einer genaueren Betrachtung des Swahili-Verbalsystems wird man feststellen, dass es sowohl Tempus- als auch Aspektmorpheme gibt, aber auch Morpheme, die sich weder als Tempus noch als Aspekt klassifizieren lassen. Ein eindeutiger Tempusmarker ist das Präteritum -li-. Das Präsens -na- und das Perfekt -me- haben sowohl aspektuelle als auch temporale Merkmale. Das Habitualispräfix -hu- oder das Suffix -aga könnten als aspektuelle Kategorien bezeichnet werden. Daneben gibt es modale Kategorien, die durch die Infixe -nge- und -ngali- sowie das Subjunktivsuffix -e ausgedrückt werden. Und es gibt die Morpheme -ka- und -ki-, die sich weder als Tempus noch als Aspekt bezeichnen lassen, sondem textlinguistische Funktionen ausdrücken, wie ich im folgenden zeigen werde.