Indian Influence in Swahili architecture. The goal of this article is to establish a synthesis of current knowledge on the contribution of the Indian world in Swahili architecture, from the islamisation to the sultanate of Zanzibar. By Indian world, we designate Pakistan and modern India, more precisely coastal regions of Sind, Gujerat and Deccan. Indians have participated at the creation of Swahili urbanism since the eighth century and have acted on the evolution of this architecture. To apprehend the role of India in the Swahili architecture, we will divide our comment in three areas: religious, civilian and military. With an historical introduction to the relationships between Africa and India.

For the past 150 years studies on Kiswahili language, literature and culture have engaged the scholarly attention of many researchers (Hauner 1979. In their analyses of Kiswahili literary works, however, most critical studies have, generally, tended to neglect the aspect of artistic design. Instead, the central focus has primarily been on two interlocking aspects of these works: (1) their content, values or thematic messages and (2) their cultural and socio-historical contexts (Dorsey 1988). This widespread tendency to undervalue the importance of artistic design in Kiswahili literary works is not surprising as it was largely promoted by some of the earlier European authorities who popularised the idea that Kiswahili literature `is not of literary interest´ and `that social, cultural, and historical commentary by anthologists are more relevant to this literature than literary study´ (Biersteker and Plane 1989:451). It is encouraging to see, however, that in recent years more and more scholars, like Mlamali (1980), Fiedel and Shariff (1986), Biersteker (1991) and Mbele (1996), to mention but a few, address issues of artistic design in their critical appraisals of Kiswahili literary works. This article is a modest attempt to follow their example by looking at Utenzi wa Shujaka as an object of design; how the poet has used the technical instruments of verbal craftsmanshjp in his bid to elicit an aesthetic response from his audience.

This article discusses one particular issue of Swahili standardization. which is, in Kiswahili Sanifu, the correct concordial agreement to be applied to the lexeme -ingine (‘other’)? Should it be treated like an adjective, as ‘classical’ works in Swahili grammar claim as well as current educational books do? How can efforts in favour of standardization comply with the appearance of different variants of concordial agreement?

In the traditional Swahili literature description has a secondary role. Characters` portrayals are limited to a few stereotyped attributes, because they represent types, not individualized characters The model of women`s beauty is taken from Arabic literature: round face, black, flowing hair, big eyes, teeth like pealls with beautiful gaps in between, slender neck... This model is valid to a large extent also in modern novels.. Thus, the complexion of an ideal woman is as clear as possible; even up-rountry heroines are often light-roloured `as a half-cast` or at least bronzed. They are preferably of medium height, lump, but with a slender waist and well-shaped legs.

Between 1977 and 1980 I collected a nuber of texts on the northern Kenya coast Most were tape recorded by myself fiom oral performances, a few were written down or recorded by others Most of the current collection consists of texts gathered so, plus: the Mwiini material, provided by Chuck Kisseberth, originally provided or recorded in Barawa by M I. Abasheikh, and the Bajuni \"contemporary\" verse, taken form a publicly available cassette-recording by AM. Msallarn in the 1970.

Sign language in Tanzania is a relatively new field of linguistics that is yet to attract many researchers and linguists in particular Tanzanian Sign Language (TSL) functions as a unifying tool for the deaf in the country and, probably, beyond. This language, which is still at its early stage of development, is used in the same linguistic environment with Kiswahili, the national language, which is more established. The situation leaves TSL disadvantaged and is thus likely to cause a one-way linguistic influence, from Kiswahili to TSL. This paper, therefore, examines the nature and impact of the situation. Firstly, it focuses on the question of whether or not TSL is an independent language that has developed as a seperate language, quite distinct from the spoken languages of the communities that surround it, especially Kiswahili. Secondly, it examines the extent to which Kiswahili has influenced TSL and thus the role that the former plays in learning and developing the latter. The results of the study show that Kiswahili has had some influence on TSL but the influence is marginal at lexical level. Of all the signs studied, only 13% were directly related to Kiswahili. The majority of the signs studied were found to be iconic in nature, but only 12% of all signs were semantically transparent. Even in these cases where the signs are transparent, the transparency of the signs is not based on one`s knowledge of Kiswahili. Most of the transparent signs are common gestures that any person of any ethnic origin can interpret. The study has thus established that TSL is more of a sign language than signed language. It is an indigenous African sign language, unrelated to the Western Sign Languages, except for the manual alphabet. Finally, the study predicts that much of the transperancy and iconicity in TSL will gradually fade away as the language develops across time, space, and generations.

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.

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.

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.

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.