Swahili language old name was Kingozi, but as traders came from Arabic, Persian, and Indian countries, their vocabulary intermingled with the language. It was originally written in Arabic script.
The earliest known documents written in Swahili are letters written in Kilwa in 1711 in the Arabic script that were sent to the Portuguese of Mozambique and their local allies. The original letters are preserved in the Historical Archives of Goa, India
Swahili is a Bantu language of the Sabaki branch. In Guthrie’s geographic classification, Swahili is in Bantu zone G, whereas the other Sabaki languages are in zone E70, commonly under the name Nyika.
Local folk-theories of the language have often considered Swahili to be a mixed language because of its many loan words from Arabic, and the fact that Swahili people have historically been Muslims. However, historical linguists do not consider the Arabic influence on Swahili to be significant enough to classify it as a mixed language, since Arabic influence is limited to lexical items, most of which have only been borrowed after 1500, while the grammatical and syntactic structure of the language is typically Bantu.
Christian missionaries were the ones that spread the Latin alphabet to the Swahili people. They used it to communicate with the natives, spreading it further.
Since Swahili was the language of commerce in East Africa, the colonial administrators wanted to standardize it. In June 1928, an interterritorial conference attended by representatives of Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda, and Zanzibar took place in Mombasa. The Zanzibar dialect was chosen as standard Swahili for those areas,and the standard orthography for Swahili was adopted.
Swahili has become a second language spoken by tens of millions in three African Great Lakes countries (Tanzania, Kenya, and the DRC) where it is an official or national language. It is the only African language in the African Union.
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Swahili in Arabic script—memorial plate at the Askari Monument, Dar es Salaam (1927)
( @xuma alienda wapi? nilikua nataka kujua tofauti ya komba mwiko na mende) @Okwonkwo saidia please