waswahili

The Swahili people (Swahili: WaSwahili) are a Bantu ethnic group inhabiting East Africa. Members of this ethnicity primarily reside on the Swahili coast, in an area encompassing the Zanzibar archipelago, littoral Kenya, the Tanzania seaboard, northern Mozambique, the Comoros Islands, and Northwest Madagascar. More recently, Swahili identity is centered around any person of African descent who speaks Swahili as their first language, is Muslim and lives in a town on the main urban centers of most of modern day Tanzania and coastal Kenya, northern Mozambique and the Comoros, through a process of swahilization.The name Swahili is an Exonym derived from Arabic: سواحل, romanized: Sawāhil, lit. 'coasts'.
Swahili people speak the Swahili language. Swahili people's endonym for themselves is Waungwana, which means "the civilized ones." Modern Standard Swahili, derived from the Kiunguja dialect of Zanzibar. Like many other world language, Swahili has borrowed a number of words from foreign languages, particularly administrative terms from Arabic, but also words from Portuguese, Hindi and German. Other, older dialects like Kimrima and Kitumbatu have far fewer Arabic loanwords, indicative of the language's fundamental Bantu nature. Kiswahili served as coastal East Africa's lingua franca and trade language from the ninth century onward. Zanzibari traders' intensive push into the African interior from the late eighteenth century induced the adoption of Swahili as a common language throughout much of East Africa. Thus, Kiswahili is the most spoken African language though it is used by far more than just the Waswahili themselves.

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