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Emerging dialect areas: Contact, change and variation in Swahili

Hannah Gibson

University of Essex

Dewey 1101 Auditorium

Swahili is a major lingua franca spoken by more than 100 million people across East Africa. The language is spoken by diverse communities in a wide range of language ecologies and socio-cultural contexts. Dialectal variation in Swahili, particularly in relation to phonology and morphology, has long been noted (e.g. Steer 1870, Stigand 1915, Bakari 1985, King’ei 2000, Rugemalira 2010). However, less attention has been paid to structural variation and to the emergence of new varieties such as urban youth languages or dialectal differences linked to more recent projects of nation building. Moreover, the effects of multilingualism and language contact, both structural and sociolinguistic, in the emergence of new dialects has only recently begun to be analysed. 

This talk draws on structural and sociolinguistic data gathered as part of a 4-year international collaborative research project which aimed to examine dialectal variation in Swahili, focusing on Kenya and Tanzania. We draw on data gathered via a combination of elicitation, interviews and observation from across the two countries. The data suggest a broad emerging dialectal division into five main areas: Kenya Mainland, Nairobi, Tanzania Mainland, Coastal Dialects, and Western Swahili. The urban centres of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam also display separate dynamics, showing influence from several dialectal regions, and the emergence of urban varieties. Our data also show that while larger geographical dialect groupings are emerging, micro- and macro-variation is also found within and across these zones.

Results reported in the talk help us to better understand emerging dialectal variation in Swahili while at the same time providing novel and complex insights for the study of variation. We also show how the study of dialectology stands to derive considerable benefits from the study of African languages.