The Englishization of Tanzanian Kiswahili

ABSTRACT: The paper discusses the influence of English on Kiswahili, namely, the Englishization of Kiswahili on the basis of data extracted from various recent textbooks, pop stories, magazines, and from official documents. ‘Englishization’ is a term used to refer to the linguistic influence of English on another language. While Englishization is considered advantageous in the study of contact linguistics (B. Kachru, 1989; Weinrich, 1953), because it has become a valuable tool of modernizing a language, there are still conflicting views by Tanzanians towards this phenomenon. A certain group of speakers of Kiswahili, mainly educators, feel that the Englishization of Kiswahili is indispensable considering the role English has as a language of specialization, and its usefulness as a source of vocabulary and new ideas with which to express meanings more precisely. Others, like the purists, believe that Englishization should be avoided as it dilutes the purity of the language. While acknowledging the reality of these attitudes, the Englishization of Kiswahili is a natural development, given the historical contact between the two languages. One of the aims of this paper is to show that the modernization of Kiswahili is vital to enable it to carry out the various functions it has been called upon to fulfil in the region. It will be shown that the deliberate attempt by language planners to expand the lexicon through English borrowings not only results in modernization, but eventually leads to the Englishization of the Kiswahili lexicon. In the same way, the unconscious adoption of English grammatical devices through code‐mixing and literal translation also leads to the Englishization of Kiswahili. Most crucial is that the process of Englishization results in important language changes at the various levels of the language structure, as will be observed in this discussion.