Dr. Ibrahim Bosha Ahmad is one of handful researchers on the subject of Arabic loans in Swahili, who are native speakers of Arabic. Already in 1993, his KamusiThulathia (the Trilingual Swahili/Arabic/English Dictionary published by Dar Es Salaam University Press (DUP)- Tanzania) was the most exhaustive study of Arabic loans in Swahili. Swahili, a Bantu language, is the most widespread African language south of the Sahara, and about 40% of its current vocabulary is of non-Bantu origin. For obvious reasons, most of the earlier non-Bantu borrowings are from Arabic, which is the largest mother tongue in Africa. – Arabic is the Latin of Muslims in many parts of Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe; and on the East African coast, the Swahili are a good example of an Afro-Islamic civilization that has blended well Persian, Arab-Islamic, and north-western Indian and Indonesian cultural and linguistic elements. Arabic is by far the largest contributor to Swahili. However, most of the recent loanwords in Swahili are from English, especially in the fields of modern education, science and technology, sports and modern entertainment. Arabic lexical items have been described and analysed by several writers from the middle of the twentieth century but few researchers have paid any attention to the question of Arabic structural loans, or Arabic grammatical intrusion or interference, in Swahili. Many Arabiclexical and grammatical loans are further spread to other languages of Eastern Africa as indirect Arabic loans. Arabic loans in Swahili express various aspects of life in Eastern Africa: they describe religious ideas and practices, both Islamic and Christian, and are an essential part of the terminology of Islamic religious life and the Swahili Muslim culture. Arabic loans are found in all social aspects. They describe the Eastern African concept of time and telling time, and are met with in mathematics (counting, arithmetic, enumeration) and in many aspects of material culture (architecture, dress, food), art, literature and music. Most basic educational, technological and scientific terms and paraphernalia such as book, pen and paper, are borrowed from Arabic. In Swahili literature one finds much Islamic or Muslim and Oriental influence described in Arabic literary terms and imagery embedded with Middle Eastern tradition; and for obvious historical reasons Arabic loans abound in the realms of administration, commerce, law, poetry and politics. Arabic loanwords fall into all categories in Swahili, and cover all aspects of life in the Swahili society in particular, and the Eastern African region in general. The south Arabian contacts however refer particularly to parts of a ship and shipbuilding, more common among the northern Swahili who are geographically closer to the Hadramaut coast of Yemen and who have mixed very much with the Hadrami people. Emigration from the Swahili coast to the Gulf region and Oman, immigration from Hadramaut and the Gulf to East Africa, and Arabian and Iranian integration with the Swahili people continues even today. Contacts between various peoples of the north-western parts of the Indian Ocean have been and still are numerous. In the present study, Ibrahim Boshadeals with the heavy influence of Arabic on the Swahili language, especially the socio-cultural lexis. He examines both the Arabic grammatical loans and also structural loans. Hitherto very little serious research has been conducted on the question of Arabic grammatical loans and structural intrusion in Swahili, which is further spreading to the other languages of Eastern Africa. Indirect Arabicgrammatical loans via Swahili in other Bantu languages of Eastern Africa are widely spread, and arebecoming common throughout Eastern Africa, with thousands of Arabic indirect lexical borrowings in these languages, and they have high socio-cultural value. This study also narrates a history of Arabic in Eastern Africa, and considers analytically the causes of this deep going and far reaching language contacts between Arabic and Swahili, the processes of linguistic borrowing, linguistic and phonetic changes of lexical and structural Arabic original forms and also a number of cases of semantic changes. The strength of this study is in its systematic, careful and meticulous treatment of the subject of Arabic influences in Swahili as well as in the abundance of relevant and necessary details. This work should be read as a handbook by both teachers and students of Swahili.
DEDICATION v
FOREWORD vii
PREFACE xi
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT xv
ABSTRACT xvii
CONTENTS xxiii
LIST OF TABLES xxv
ABBREVIATIONS, ACRONYMS AND SYMBOLS xxvii
Chapter 1 1
A. Research Preliminaries 1
B. Historical and Linguistic Background 6
CHAPTER 2: Phonological Changes 13
A. Consonantal Changes 16
B. The Arabic Vowel System 37
C. Diphthongs 40
D. Morphonemic Changes 41
E. Observations on Phonological Changes 44
CHAPTER 3: Morphological changes 49
A. Categories of Verb 49
B. Number 50
C. Morphological Changes 74
Chapter 4: Syntactic Changes 87
A. Noun Phrase Changes 88
B. Verbal Phrase (VP) Changes 94
C. Adjectival Phrases 97
D. Adverbial Phrases 103
E. Prepositional Phrases in Kiswahili 115
CHAPTER 5: SEMANTIC CHANGES 119
A. Semantic Equivalence 121
B. Semantic Narrowing 124
C. Semantic Broadening 151
D. Semantic Opposition 174
Chapter 6: Conclusions 183
A. Conclusion and Recommendation 183
REFFERENCES 185
APPENDIX 195
