Swahili and Sabaki

Book excerpt: The Sabaki languages form a major Bantu subgroup and are spoken by 35 million East Africans in Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, and the Comoro Islands. The authors provide a historical/comparative treatment of Swahili (and other Sabaki languages), an account of the relationship of Swahili to Sabaki and to other Bantu languages, and some data on contemporary Sabaki languages. Data sets, appendices, maps, and figures present essential information on phonology, lexical makeup, and tense/aspect morphology. The final chapter is a synthesis describing the linguistic and historical relationship of the Sabaki dialects to each other and to hypothetical proto-stages.