Swahili-French-English Phrasebook

By Shck Tchamna

This book contains over 2000 expressions carefully chosen from the most used expressions in everyday conversations, in Swahili language. Basic grammar of the Swahili language is given at the beginning of the book, without which it wouldn't be easy to understand the Swahili morphology and syntax, especially the notion of verbal complex, that binds subject markers, verbs and object market together, without space delimiter.

This book is very special in that, it is written by three Africans coming from three different countries: 1) Shck Tchamna, from Cameroon, the main author of the book, Oyange, the translator, from Kenya, and Rahma Nsekela the proofreader, from Tanzania. You will definitely feel a touch of the Bamileke Culture of Cameroon, Kenya and Tanzania Culture. This is the type of Collaboration that should be encouraged in order to bring African children together. The other uniqueness of the book is its trilingual feature. This will definitely bring French speaking people closer to the most spoken language of Africa.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shck Tchamna
• Release date: Jan 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201779702

Shck Tchamna

Shck Cǎmna' (Tchamna) is author of about forty books and co-author of over twenty applications for learning African languages, including Twi in Ghana, Wolof in Senegal, Chichewa in Malawi, Nko, Amharic, Swahili, Lingala, Kikongo, Duala, Basaa, Ewondo, Medumba, etc., not to mention a wealth of works in his mother tongue, Fe'efe'e, a Bamileke language also called nùfī, spoken in West Cameroon. To top it all off, he is the founder of a nonprofit called Resulam, resurrection of ancestral mother tongues.

Book preview

List of Tables

Table 1. Swahili Vowel: Vowel ya kiswahili.

Table 2. Swahili consonant: Konsonanti za Kiswahili.

Table 3. Swahili borrowed words with suggestions on how to create new words.

Table 4. Comparison between Standard Swahili and Kenya Up-Country Swahili.

Table 5. Affirmative subject prefix, Object Infix and their negation.

Table 6. Tenses and aspect markers with their negation.

Table 7. Conjugation of the verb to sleep in the past, present and future

Table 8. Negative conjugation of the verb to kucheza: to play | to dance in the past, present and future

Table 9. Conjugation of the verb Kuwa: to be.

Table 10. Negative conjugation of the verb Kuwa: to be.

Table 11. Conjugation of the verb Kuwa na: to have.

Table 12. Negative conjugation of the verb Kuwa na: to have.

Table 13. Particularity of the particle -na.

Swahili language status and history.

Kiswahili, literally Swahili language, is a Bantu language. It is the most spoken Bantu language in the world. It is the official language of Tanzania and Kenya, and is also spoken in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the Comoros Islands, Burundi, Rwanda, Northern Zambia, Malawi, Somalia and Mozambique. For that reason, it is officially the lingua franca of the East African Community. It is one of the working languages of the African Union and of the Southern African Development Community. In 2018, South Africa legalized the teaching of Swahili in South African schools as an optional subject to begin in 2020. Botswana followed in 2020, and Namibia also plans to introduce it in their academic systems.

Although Kiswahili is full Arabic loanwords, the language is a Bantu language which is believed to originate from the modern-day Cameroon. In fact, the Bantu expansion/migration originated from the adjoining regions of Cameroon and Nigeria about 5,000 years ago. Grollemund et al., reconstructed the route of the Bantu people expansion, and found that the Grassfield people of Cameroon was the homeland of the common ancestors to the Bantu (Grollemund, Branford et al. 2015).

The expansion is believed to have taken place in at least two waves and two directions:

the first went across the Congo Forest region and reached the interlacustrine (bounded by Lakes) region of East Africa, namely Lakes Victoria (Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania), Kyoga (Uganda), Albert and Edward (Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda), and Tanganyika (Tanzania, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Zambia and Burundi). forming the eastern stream.

The second which forms the west Bantu migration stream, went south along the African coast into Gabon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Angola, or inland along the many south-to-north flowing rivers of the Congo River system. The expansion likely reached South Africa as early as 300 A.D (Grollemund, Branford et al. 2015).

Swahili language alphabet.

Swahili language was originally written in Arabic script. In fact, Arabic has a great imprint on the Swahili language. Arabic marks can be seen all over the Swahili language, through loanwords. Arabs arrived on the Swahili Coast (shores of East Africa) around the 8th century for trading and religious purpose. They name local people Sawaḥili, meaning people of the coast (sahil means coast in Arabic). Later on, the contact of Swahili people with the Portuguese and Germans resulted in the change of Swahili script from Arabic script to roman/latin script in use till today.

The current Swahili alphabet is easy to learn for those familiar with latin script. It is a phonetic but non-tonal language. If you master the sound associated with each letter, then you are good to go with the language. All letters are pronounced here. The Swahili alphabet consists of five vowels and twenty-five single consonants, very closed to what we already know in English or French. The vowels, as we mentioned before, include a, e, i, o, u. The consonants include b, c, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, w, y, z. The only two missing consonants are q and x. in addition, we have ch, dh, gh, ng’, sh, th that are also considered consonants because the correspond to a single sound.

The letter g is always hard-pronounced. Just like g in the word Good, and never like the g in gem. Table 1 and Table 2 bellow shows the Swahili alphabet, along with word example containing the letter in Swahili, the English translation of the word.

Table 1. Swahili Vowel: Vowel ya kiswahili.

Table 2. Swahili consonant: Konsonanti za Kiswahili.

Authors' personal opinion.

I, shck Ca᷅mnà' (Tchamna), am in favor for Swahili as THE African language, of course, while making sure that all other languages are preserved. Although I advocate for Kiswahili as THE African language, I am strongly against the Swahili at its current form, full of loanwords from Arabic and English. I am not against, borrowing words from other culture, but my philosophy is: We borrow what we don’t have. When you borrow what you already have, then, either you are greedy, or you despise what you have, and think what your neighbor has is better than what you possess. Borrowing can be useful for science and technology terms, but not for mere and most common words such as "alphabet: alfabeti, medical doctor: Daktari, Family: familia, glove: glavu", the months of the year entirely borrowed from English! We deserve better than that! These borrowed words show our WEAKNESSES and LAZINESS!!! Every language evolves, and new word should be created as the world evolved. Otherwise, the volume of authentic words of the language will be a very tiny percentage of the loanwords. Swahili should borrow from other Bantu languages, not from distant languages such as English and Arabic. In the table below, I suggest some word construction based on the Nùfī language, also called fè'éfě'è, a bamileke language from West Cameroon.

Table 3. Swahili borrowed words with suggestions on how to create new words.

Note on Swahili variants.

Out of multiple dialects of Swahili, there are three most important dialects: 1) the Kiunguja, spoken on Zanzibar and in the mainland areas of Tanzania, 2) the Kimvita, spoken in Mombasa and other areas of Kenya, and 3) the Kiamu, spoken on the island of Lamu in Kenya. Out of these three main dialects, Kiunguja spoken in Tanzania is considered the standard Swahili dialect. According to SIL (Summer Institute of Linguistics), the Swahili spoken in Tanzania can be broken up into the dialects of Mrima (Mtang’ata), Unguja (Kiunguja, Zanzibar), Pemba, and Mgao (Kimgao). SIL also has a measure of how close to each other different dialects are, called lexical similarity. For example, Bajun dialect is 85% closer to the Amu dialect, 78% closer to Mvita dialect, 72% closer to Mrima dialect; Mvita dialect is 86% closer to Amu, 79% closer to Mrima; Mrima dialect is 79% closer to Amu. On the other hand, the Swahili spoken in Kenya can be broken up into the dialects of Amu (Ozi), Mvita (Kimvita, Mombasa), Bajuni (Bajun, Gunya, Tikulu, Tikuu, Tukulu), Pemba (Hadimu, Phemba, Tambatu), Mambrui (Malindi), Pate, Siu (Siyu), Jomvu, Kilindini, Changamwe, Ngare, Vumba, Tangana, Chitundi, Faza, Katwa, Kilifi, Mtwapa, and Shaka. [4-6]. Apart from Kingwana (a lingua franca in Congo) and Kingazija (the main lingua franca in the Comoros), most of the dialects are almost extinct.

In Congo words from local Congolese languages have also been introduced into Swahili. The main linguistic variants are: Haut-Katanga, Lualaba, Haut-Lomami, Tanganyika (in the south-eastern provinces), and Sud-Kivu, Nord-Kivu, Maniema, Ituri and Tshopo (in the north-eastern provinces).

In Kenya there is a difference between the coastal and the so-called up-country Swahili. The latter is less grammatical.

While East Africans mix Swahili with English, Central Africans mix it with lots of French.

Generally speaking, Tanzanians are more fluent in Kiswahili as compared to a typical Kenyan; in fact, Kenyans generally speaks adulterated Kiswahili with poor grammar and often slang. Kenyans who tend to speak pure Swahili are native of coastal areas like Mombasa, a little bit different from the Tanzanians but the differences are so negligible and wouldn't hinder communication. To end up this section, it is worth mentioning that Tanzanian Swahili speakers are generally more polite. For instance, Kenyans would say give me, while Tanzanians would say excuse me, please, may I have this or that, and finish with thank you.