Swahili

Swahili is spoken natively by various groups traditionally inhabiting about 1,500 miles of the East African coastline. About 35% of the Swahili vocabulary derives from the Arabic language, resulting from the fact that the language evolved through centuries of contact between Arabic-speaking traders and many different Bantu-speaking peoples inhabiting Africa's Indian Ocean coast. It also has incorporated Persian, German, Portuguese, Indian and English words into its vocabulary due to contact with these different groups of people. Swahili has become a second language spoken by tens of millions in three countries, Tanzania, Kenya, and Congo (DRC), where it is an official or national language. The neighboring nation of Uganda made Swahili a required subject in primary schools in 1992 – although this mandate has not been well implemented – and declared it an official language in 2005. Swahili, or other closely related languages, is also used by relatively small numbers of people in Burundi, Rwanda, Mozambique, Somalia, and Zambia, and nearly the entire population of the Comoros.
In the Guthrie nongenetic classification of Bantu languages, Swahili is included under Bantoid/Southern/Narrow Bantu/Central/G.
The name 'Kiswahili' comes from the plural of the Arabic word sāhil ساحل: sawāhil سواحل meaning "boundary" or "coast" (used as an adjective to mean "coastal dwellers" or, by adding 'ki-' ["language"] to mean "coastal language"). (The word "sahel" is also used for the border zone of the Sahara ("desert")). The incorporation of the final "i" is likely to be the nisba (adjectival form) in Arabic (of the coast "sawāhalii" سواحلي), although some state it is for phonetic reasons.
One of the earliest known documents in Swahili is an epic poem in the Arabic script titled Utendi wa Tambuka ("The History of Tambuka"); it is dated 1728. The Latin alphabet has since become standard under the influence of European colonial powers