The Dialects of the Zanzibar Sultanate

T he language of Zanzibar par excellence is Swahili, and Zanzibar may be said to be the home of this language, not in the sense that its oldest form is spoken there, but because the Zanzibar dialect has come to be known best, owing to the writings of such men as Steere, Madan, Sacleux, and, to some extent, Krapf, though his dictionary is mainly devoted to the Mombasa dialect. Also in the days of the opening up of Africa, explorers and traders generally fixed up their caravans in Zanzibar, and these porters and soldiers journeyed into the far interior, some of them remaining there and thus making Swahili a lingua franca understood, as Steere says, along the coasts of Madagascar and Arabia, and in Central or inter-Tropical Africa, as well as by the Seedees (Sidis) in India.