Is Swahili a Pidgin?
A blog that I read recently had a post that described the east-African language of Swahili, as a pidgin. Here is a quote:
…my mother was born in East Africa (Uganda) and I wanted to feel a trace of what she once knew. Being under this sky, on this land, the pidgin that is Swahili ringing in my ears, I sought to better understand some part of her that ended when she was a teenager…
I, being an amateur linguist, see this as a perfect opportunity to test out my “Lingfu” by snarkly correcting a minor gaffe by this much more popular blogger. First let us learn a bit about Swahili. From the UCLA Language Materials Project Language Profiles Page on Swahili, I was able to find that…
- Swahili is spoken by an estimated 50 million people
- It is the official language of Tanzania and Kenya, used extensively in Uganda and the eastern provinces of Zaire, and is known and used in major urban centers of Burundi and Rwanda
- Swahili has less than two million native speakers, but there is a growing number of native speakers in urban areas.
- East-Africa, much like the rest of Africa, is linguistically rich; so multilingualism is very common among the population.
- Swahili is used as a lingua franca and most acquire it as a second language.
- It gets a bit complicated with the variations (dialects) of Swahili, but roughly all are mutually intelligible, they just differ primarily in certain phonological and lexical features
- There is a “standard dialect” based on the coastal dialect of Zanzibar, Kiunguja
Now with that ten second refresher course in Swahili we must refresh ourselves in what is a pidgin…
an auxiliary language that has come into existence through the attempts by the speakers of two different languages to communicate and that is primarily a simplified form of one of the languages, with a reduced vocabulary and grammatical structure and considerable variation in pronunciation.
Hmmm…. “an auxiliary language” one that is a creation of two groups of languages that speakers use to communicate; well, that sure sounds like Swahili. In looking at the history of Swahili one will find that it was used as a language for traders, with many loan-words from Arabic, Persian, various Indian languages, Portuguese and English.
However this is where the comparisons begin to end. Pidgin languages are by definition primitive languages with many simplified grammar structures. Here are a few similarities of pidgin languages from the book Language matters…
- They are spoken when people of different native language groups have to deal with each other (most commonly for trading purposes).
- They usually use a lot of vocabulary from one language and a simplified version of the grammar structure from another.
- Difficult consonant clusters are simplified, and the vowel system is usually small
- Endings are often removed
- Most words can be used as nouns or verbs or adjectives
- Compounds are common
- etc…
The key point that I’m trying to make is that pidgins are not normal functioning languages but primitive languages that are not used as a primary language by it’s speakers. They are used only as an ad hoc language by, for instance, traders of two different languages; kind of like modernly recognized “Baby-talk” or “Foreigner-talk“.
Unlike a pidgin, Swahili is not an ad hoc language used by two different groups of language speakers for the purpose of trade. In East-Africa (Tanzania especially) Swahili plays a vital role in daily commercial, political, cultural, and social life at every level of society; this shows its far reaching and versatile nature. This is similar to any other language that is used nativity by any other group of people in this world; due to its purpose, Swahili has a level of grammar complexity that is missing from pidgins.
Now, since I am not a scholar of Swahili, or of Niger-Congo languages in general, I can’t tell you its history but since the oldest surviving documents written in Swahili dates from the early 1700s this, at least, shows that it is not just a recent invention. Also, using many loan words from other languages doesn’t tell us anything more of Swahili then it does of other languages like English, which is notorious for its theft of words.
July 21, 2008
Tags: Linguistics, pidgin, swahili Posted in: Africa, Linguistics, language
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6 Responses
Bill Chapman - July 21, 2008
I wonder
Bill Chapman - July 21, 2008
Sorry, my finger was faster than my brain!
I wonder if you see the international language Esperanto as as sort of pidgin. It is a planned second language which belongs to no one country or group of states.
Take a look at http://www.esperanto.net
Like Swahili, Esperanto works! I’ve used it in speech and writing in a dozen countries over recent years. It has a few native speakers but most opf its speakers have opted to use it for practical reasons.
Temaharay - July 21, 2008
From what I know of Esperanto, It comes under the heading of a “constructed language”. It didn’t form “naturally” like other languages (and pidgins); because of this, you can add or subtract whatever rule or requirement you want to serve whatever function you want. I mean if Esperanto lacks a certain feature/rule to convey a certain message/meaning, you can just make one up, no?
I think pidgins are a similar, naturally forming, occurrence; but without a such devoted following. Pidgin users don’t care about “advancing a language” but just with simply being understood. Constructing a whole new language takes things much father then that.
Abhi - July 21, 2008
Maybe I would be more accurate if I had written “the pidgin that Swahili has become.” They key point is that pure Swahili has been replaced by what my ears would term a pidgin. Also, taken in the context of the post it is more about my perception than it is about reality. Contextually my description is correct. If I had written “The Swahili language is a pidgin,” then it would be incorrect. Subtle difference.
A lot of the people I met use the language of their tribe as often as they use Swahili (to communicate with the general population).
Temaharay - July 21, 2008
Hey Abhi, my little post caught your attention, eh?
Well, if we are talking about perception… then I dunno. I, as sure hell, don’t know what you perceive; I can only infer things from your words, and I was sure that you were implying that Swahili was a pidgin. However, you might have wiggle room in the interpretation.
Clarification is key to comprehension, if murder to poetics.
Eurodesi - July 22, 2008
“This section begins by debunking the myth that Swahili is a pidgin, although conceding that pidginized forms of Swahili exist. … Is Swahili a pidgin? No, not historically and not in the mouths of native speakers.” – An introduction to African languages, Childs GT, 2003.
“Pidgins are not the native language of any speech community, but are instead learned as second languages.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin)
“Although only 5-10 million people speak it as their native language,[1] Swahili is a lingua franca of much of East Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is a national or official language of four nations, and is the only language of African origin among the official working languages of the African Union.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swahili_language)