A report on East Africa and Swahili language

The East African Community (EAC) is an intergovernmental organisation composed of seven countries in the Great Lakes region of East Africa: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the United Republic of Tanzania, the Republics of Kenya, Burundi, Rwanda, South Sudan, and Uganda.

Kiswahili, English and French are designated as the official languages of the EAC, with Swahili designated for development as the lingua franca of the community.

Uganda (Yuganda in Ugandan languages), officially the Republic of Uganda (Jamhuri ya Ugandaa nne ), is a landlocked country in East Africa.

The official languages are English and Swahili, although the Constitution states that "any other language may be used as a medium of instruction in schools or other educational institutions or for legislative, administrative or judicial purposes as may be prescribed by law."

Tanzania, officially the United Republic of Tanzania (Jamhuri ya Muungano wa Tanzania), is a country in East Africa within the African Great Lakes region.

The country does not have a de jure official language, although the national language is Swahili.

Kenya, officially the Republic of Kenya (Jamhuri ya Kenya), is a country in Eastern Africa.

Kenya has close ties with its fellow Swahili-speaking neighbours in the African Great Lakes region.

On 25 November 2011, it officially joined the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, a regional grouping of East African states.

In the capital, Juba, there are several thousand people who use non-classical Arabic, usually a pidgin called Juba Arabic, but South Sudan's ambassador to Kenya said on 2 August 2011 that Swahili will be introduced in South Sudan with the goal of supplanting Arabic as a lingua franca, in keeping with the country's intention of orientation toward the East African Community rather than Sudan and the Arab League.

Approximately 242 languages are spoken in the country, of which four have the status of national languages: Kituba (Kikongo), Lingala, Tshiluba, and Swahili.

Islam has been present in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since the 18th century, when Arab traders from East Africa pushed into the interior for ivory- and slave-trading purposes.

Burundi, officially the Republic of Burundi (Repuburika y’Uburundi, ; Swahili: Jamuhuri ya Burundi; French: République du Burundi, or ), is a landlocked country in the Great Rift Valley where the African Great Lakes region and East Africa converge.

Some of the most influenced languages are Persian, Turkish, Hindustani (Hindi and Urdu), Kashmiri, Kurdish, Bosnian, Kazakh, Bengali, Malay (Indonesian and Malaysian), Maldivian, Pashto, Punjabi, Albanian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Sicilian, Spanish, Greek, Bulgarian, Tagalog, Sindhi, Odia Hebrew and Hausa and some languages in parts of Africa (e.g. Swahili, Somali).

Hadhrami Arabic, spoken by around 8 million people, predominantly in Hadhramaut, and in parts of the Arabian Peninsula, South and Southeast Asia, and East Africa by Hadhrami descendants.

The Comoros was probably first settled by Austronesians subsequently followed by Bantu speakers from East Africa along with Arabs.

They are related to Swahili, and the four different variants (Shingazidja, Shimwali, Shindzwani and Shimaore) are spoken on each of the four islands.

Versions of the word Bantu (that is, the root plus the class 2 noun class prefix *ba-) occur in all Bantu languages: for example, as bantu in Kikongo and Kituba; watu in Swahili; anthu in Chichewa; batu in Lingala; bato in Kiluba; bato in Duala; abanto in Gusii; andũ in Kamba and Kikuyu; abantu in Kirundi, Lusoga, Zulu, Xhosa, Runyoro and Luganda; wandru in Shingazidja; abantru in Mpondo and Ndebele; bãthfu in Phuthi; bantfu in Swati and Bhaca; banhu in kisukuma; banu in Lala; vanhu in Shona and Tsonga; batho in Sesotho, Tswana and Northern Sotho; antu in Meru; andu in Embu; vandu in some Luhya dialects; vhathu in Venda and bhandu in Nyakyusa.

They were supposedly spread across Central, East and Southern Africa in the so-called Bantu expansion, a comparatively rapid dissemination taking roughly two millennia and dozens of human generations during the 1st millennium BC and the 1st millennium AD, This concept has often been framed as a mass-migration, but Jan Vansina and others have argued that it was actually a cultural spread and not the movement of any specific populations that could be defined as an enormous group simply on the basis of common language traits.