Learning Swahili

I love it.  I’ve always loved learning languages and Swahili is no different.  I’m enjoying the classes every morning and the rhythm of nightly homework exercises.  And even nicer, our lessons are tailored towards our needs as engineers and hospital volunteers.  The teachers are being very efficient about the vocabulary they teach us.  We will learn words to use with family around the home, to greet others, to bargain at the market, and most of all, to work in a hospital.

I love grammar, so that’s my favorite part of learning the language.  Swahili grammar seems similar to Spanish in the way we string subject and object prefixes onto verbs, but the verb conjugation is much easier.

The other day we learned about the noun classes.  Swahili has seven noun classes, but we will focus mostly on the “person” noun class.  This will help us to be polite and to avoid faux pas.  If we use the “person” noun class to describe things, we might sound silly but people will understand.  However, if we use a “thing” noun class to describe people, we might seriously offend someone.

There are a few aspects of Swahili that I find quite difficult, because they depart from anything I’ve seen previously in a language. They don’t feel intuitive or come to me naturally when speaking.

1. The singularity of plurality of a word is indicated at the beginning of the word rather than the end.  Ex: one engineer is “mhandisi” and multiple engineers are “wahandisi”. 
2. All adjectives must be given a specific prefix, depending on the noun it modifies.  The prefix corresponds directly to the noun class of the noun being modified.  Ex: to describe a small person we’d use the adjective “mdogo”, but to describe a small thing we’d use “kidogo”.

Because these two concepts are applied at the beginning of each word, I must really be sure of what I’m saying before I even begin to speak.

What is most remarkable is how much the language serves the culture.  There are many features embedded in Swahili that reflect the way of life here.  For example, there’s a “fruit” noun class.  Of the seven noun classes, one of them functions entirely to talk exclusively about fruit.  Also, they do not have a word to refer to husbands, plural.  The culture here accepts polygamy, and in some tribes men may have as many as forty wives.  So there is a word to describe wives, plural, but not husbands.  If we want to talk about a group of husbands, we would just refer to them as “men”.

In any case, I’ve really enjoyed learning about the culture through the language, since they very much go hand-in-hand.