Based on your analysis of swahili morphology, how would you classify the language? Give reasons for your choice.
Answers
Swahili is an example of a Bantu language. Bantu languages belong to the South Central subgroup of the Niger-Congo language family. These languages are closely related to languages used in central, east-central and southern Africa (Sands, 2009). Due to the colonial history of the countries in this area, Swahili contains many loanwords from English, Arabian, Persian Indian languages, Portuguese, German and other Bantu languages. Their origins are often hardly recognisable. The reason for this is that the structure remains Bantu. In this structure, the derivational system has an important role (Mohammed, 2001). This paper contains a description of this system and other underlying processes of Swahili morphology. In this description, we draw parallels between Swahili and English. As mentioned earlier, we know that Swahili is connected to English by its loanwords.