Swahili

A Bantu language that sorts every noun into a class and makes the whole sentence agree with it, and it is still one of the easier ones on the FSI scale.

• Nouns come in classes, around eighteen of them, marked by a prefix. Change the prefix and you change what kind of thing you are talking about.
• The prefix spreads: the adjective, the verb and the possessive all echo the class of the noun. A sentence agrees with itself all the way through.
• It is rated at 36 weeks, the same as German, despite working nothing like English.
• Most of its speakers learned it as a second language. It is the trade and school language of a large part of East Africa.
• Its vocabulary carries a heavy Arabic layer from centuries of Indian Ocean trade, starting with the name itself.
• Its numerals travel further than the language does. Hadza speakers, several hundred kilometres away and unrelated to it, borrow Swahili numbers for anything above two.
• It lost the tones the rest of its family kept.

All the untranslatable words →

Swahili in the archive, next to the other sixty-six →