Kiswahili (G40)

Abstract Kiswahili is spoken by approximately 100 million people in Eastern Africa. This chapter focuses on the Standard Kiswahili. The lexicon of Kiswahili contains nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs as the major word classes. The noun class system in Kiswahili is reduced as the common diminutive classes [ka-/tu-] is absent and the locative nouns 16-18 are represented by the suffix -ni as mwituni ‘in the forest’. These noun classes manifest in underived and derived nouns, e.g. mchezaji/wachezaji ‘player(s)’. The word order within a clause is primarily SVO, while the pattern in an NP is typically (DEM) » N (POSS/DEM) » (ADJ/NUM/QUANT). The freedom of occurrence of the adnominal elements is basically not fully available for demonstratives and possessives. The verbal paradigm in Kiswahili is typically Bantu, with inflection markers for tenses, negation, predicate markers, etc. being present in prefixal position, while derivational affixes called verb extensions appear after the root.