Sampling Swahili
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As a Nigerian, I am not expected to speak Swahili. It is too far removed even in geography to be remotely considered needful. So whenever I sit in the cybercafé browsing for a Swahili dictionary, or conversing in my smattering Swahili phrases on an online chat, a few eyes look at me in some wonder.
My country itself is a linguistic melting pot, with over about 400 native Nigerian languages identified, some already threatened with extinction so learning a foreign language becomes somewhat tiring. Don’t get this wrong. There are people here, like in other places, to whom second, third, and even fourth language acquisition is fun and inspiring. I guess Swahili is just not one such language to us. Nobel Laureate Professor Wole Soyinka had once in the seventies called on the Nigerian government to adopt Swahili as a national language so as to deal with (the seeming problem of) our multilingualism. That hasty suggestion has however been gladly jettisoned, and we have gone on to develop our own language and their facilities to deal with a globalizing world.
But here I was in Eldoret in 2005, being introduced to Swahili and learning, for the first time, how even more similar the language was to many of our own national languages at home. I stumbled once in the presence of a few friends, and, because I had told them to encourage me by speaking the language to me most of the time, they offered their concern in Swahili: “pole pole” which means something close to “be careful”. When they want to say “I’m sorry”, or “Accept my sympathy”, I get “pole”, pronounced as two syllables. It was then that the similarity stuck. In Yoruba, those two instances would elicit “pele pele” and “pele” respectively. My curiosity was forever sufficiently aroused. I called for a standard 400-word list, found a willing informant patient to give the words required, and rummaged through in an effort to find more reasons to adopt Swahili as a long lost sibling tongue of my language.
To be continued
