UN_Swahili_Language_Day
UN Swahili Language Day
New United Nations Swahili Language Day
UN Swahili Language Day (Swahili: Siku ya Kiswahili ya Umoja wa Mataifa) is observed annually on 7 July.[1] This began when the United Nations declared 7 July as Swahili Language Day in 2022.[2] On 7 July 1954, Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) leader Julius Kambarage Nyerere, the eventual first President of Tanzania, adopted the Swahili Language as a unifying language for African independence struggles. Jomo Kenyatta, the first President of Kenya, followed suit and also used the Swahili language to mobilize and unify the people of Kenya in the struggle against colonialism through the use of the popular “Harambee” slogan.[3]
UN Swahili Language Day marks the first United Nations designation of an African-originated language for a Official languages of the United Nations § Language Days at the UN, the other language days were from the six (6) official languages of the United Nations which are Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish.[4]
The Swahili language is within the Niger-Congo language group and originated as a trade language amongst the people of the eastern African coast and the northern coast of Madagascar. Sixteen to twenty percent of the Swahili vocabulary are Arabic loanwords, including the name of the language (سَوَاحِلي, sawāḥilī, a plural adjectival form of an Arabic word meaning 'of the coast'). The loanwords date from contact with Arabic-speaking traders with the Bantu inhabitants of the east coast of Africa from the 1500's to European colonization.[5] Swahili is currently a prominent language spoken in a variety of locations along the African Great Lakes Region and is spoken by upwards of 200 million people as a second language. [6]
