Swahili (people)
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| ca. 500,000 | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
| Tanzania (particularly Zanzibar), Kenya (110,614),Mozambique, Oman | |
| Languages | |
| Swahili | |
| Religion | |
| Islam (Sunni, Shia, Sufism) | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Mijikenda, other Bantu peoples, Shirazi |
The Swahili people (or Waswahili) are an ethnic and cultural group inhabiting East Africa. Members mainly reside on the Swahili Coast, in an area encompassing the Zanzibar archipelago, coastal Kenya, the Tanzania seaboard, and northern Mozambique. The name Swahili is derived from the Arabic word Sawahil سواحل, meaning "coasts." The Swahili speak the Swahili language, which belongs to the Bantu branch of the Niger-Congo family.
The Swahili people originate from Bantu inhabitants of the coast of Southeast Africa, in Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique. They are mainly united under the mother tongue of Swahili, a Bantu language. But it was the Arabs and Persians, and other migrants who first reached the Swahili coast some believe around the 7th and 8th centuries, who provided considerable cultural infusion and numerous loan words from Arabic and Persian. On arrival, the Muslims settled along the coast, engaging in trade. It is most commonly believed that the Shirazi Persians intermarried with the local Bantu people, resulting in the Swahili people, most of whom converted to Islam. It was only then that Swahili, structurally a Bantu language with heavy borrowings from Arabic, was born. Felix Chami notes the presence of Bantu settlements straddling the Southeast African coast as early as the beginning of the 1st millennium. They evolved gradually from the 6th century onward to accommodate for an increase in trade (mainly with Arab merchants), population growth, and further centralized urbanization; developing into what would later become known as the Swahili city-states.
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