Kiswahili (Swahili)
East Africa's official lingua franca
Kiswahili is a Bantu language and the lingua franca of East Africa, spoken across Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and recognized as an official language of the African Union. Centuries of trade along the Swahili coast left it with a substantial layer of Arabic loanwords, and today it's one of the most widely understood languages on the continent, with the large majority of its speakers using it as a second or additional language.
Writing system
What counts as correct
Unlike Yorùbá or Igbo, Kiswahili isn't tonal and doesn't use accent marks — its distinctive features are grammatical rather than diacritical. Nouns are organized into classes, each with its own prefixes that ripple through agreement on verbs and adjectives, and digraphs like ng' and ny represent single, specific sounds that have to stay exactly as written.
Why it matters
Precision, not approximation
Getting Kiswahili right is less about marks on letters and more about getting the noun-class prefixes and digraphs consistent throughout a sentence — a single mismatched prefix reads as a grammar mistake to a native speaker. Itumo checks for exactly that kind of consistency, not just word-for-word substitution.
Try it
Translate Swahili with Itumo
Pair Kiswahili with any of Itumo's other languages — including direct African-to-African translation.
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