Viswahili vya Tanzania: morphosyntactic variation and its perception in four areas of Tanzania.

Historically, research on variation in Swahili has focused mostly on coastal dialects (e.g. Steer 1870, Stigand 1915, etc.) with later work including also mainland varieties (e.g. King’ei 2000, Rugemalira 2010). The distinction between varieties of the coast and those of the mainland – often characterised by language contact – still exists in the literature as well as in speakers’ perception (Gibson et al. 2023). In this talk we present emerging findings from our project which investigates morphosyntactic variation in present-day Swahili. Our initial findings, based on both structural and sociolinguistic data, suggest a broad dialectal division into four main areas: Kenya Mainland, Tanzania Mainland, Coastal Dialects, and Western Swahili. Against this background, we focus on Swahili variation in Tanzania and explore to what extend the mainland and the coast form distinct dialect regions. We draw on data collected in four locations across Tanzania – Mtwara, Iringa, Moshi and Dar es Salaam – to look at the morphosyntactic variation attested as well as sociolinguistic interviews exploring speakers’ perception of this variation. Our data show systematic differences between Mtwara, representing coastal Swahili, and Iringa and Moshi, representing Mainland Tanzania Swahili. As a major urban centre, Dar es Salaam constitutes a separate case with influence from several dialectal regions. Our data also show that while larger geographical dialect zones are emerging in our research, micro- and macro-variation is also found beyond these zones. Note: This talk has not gone through a process of peer review, and findings should therefore be treated as preliminary and subject to change. Acknowledgement and citation: Poeta, Teresa and Julius Taji. 2024. Viswahili vya Tanzania: morphosyntactic variation and its perception in four areas of Tanzania. Talk given at the Rift Valley Network Webinar Series. 24/01/2024.