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Kenya

• Country in eastern Africa
• Lies between Somalia to the north east and Tanzania to the south
• Surrounding countries of ethopia and sudan to north and Uganda to the west
• Nirobi is the capital

The official language: ENGLISH and SWAHILI

About 30 other indeginous languages or dialects present Kenya.
Among linguistic groups in Kenya.:

Bantu , mainly in western kenya and lake victoria region.

Cushitic Somali speaking group occupying eastern portions of Kenya.

Rendille and Orma speaking groups occupy the north western part.

Many others.

English is one of the official languages. It is spoken in major cities and by those connected to the tourist industry. Schools and some governments are in english. With almost everything else being in Swahili.

English was brought to Kenya by British colonizers in 1919, when organized African political activity developed.

Swahili or Kiswahili is the other official language in Kenya. It is widely spoken and has become the most extended indigenous language in Africa with 50 million speakers

The name of this language is origionally an arab term sahils or awahil, a term for the East African coast and the islands where Swahili originated. The name ‘Kiswahili’ comes from the plural of the Arabic word sahel ساحل: sawahil سواحل meaning “boundary” or “coast”.

Though it was initially transcribed in arabic writing, the origin of Swahili lies on the Bantu language, as shown by its grammar and syntax.

Maybe the absence of writing among the natives caused the first written texts in Swahili to be in the arab alphabet, which reached the coast first. Swahili language is heavily influenced by Arabic language and culture.

The arabs settled on the Coast of Kenya after ousting the Portugese in the late 1800s to early 1900s. so Swahili uses many Arabic words.
The people along the Coast originally Bantu, already had a language, but in order to communicate with the trader/settlers, they needed to mould their language around the Arabs’, thus Swahili.

Swahili is very different from the rest of the native tongues because it is not actually an ethnic language, or the patrimony of a tribe.

In Kenya Swahli has seven dialects and three sub-dialects.

The Kiswahili is a national language in Kenya The young urban people in Nairobi speak a peculiar dialect, a mixture of English, Swahili and some ethnic tongues, which is known as Sheng. Born in the city slums, Sheng has become a fashionable sign of modernity and cosmopolitanism for the Kenyan youth. Sheng uses mainly the Swahili grammar and syntax, but includes terms from other languages that can vary depending on the different environments.

In addition to Swahili and English, most of the people in Kenya also speak what they would call their “mother tongue” - the language that they grew up speaking. While an increasing number of city-dwellers are growing up speaking English, most rural people still speak their tribal languages when they go home.

Interesting thing about Swahili language:

Swahili time runs from dawn to dusk, rather than midnight to midday. 7am and 7pm are therefore both one o’clock while midnight and midday are six o’clock. Swahili time derives from the fact that the sun rises at around 6am and sets at around 6pm everyday in most of the areas where Swahili speakers reside.