Swahili Grammar for Introductory and Intermediate Levels (Sarufi ya Kiswahili cha Ngazi ya Kwanza na Kati) by Oswald Almasi, Michael David Fallon and Nazish Pardhan Wared (review)

This book consists of forty chapters, each one containing an introduction to the main concepts therein, a breakdown of the material to make it easier to understand, examples of use, practice exercises, and a vocabulary list of all new words in that chapter. The lists are then combined and placed as a glossary at the end of the book, titled 'Dictionary' – an inapt heading because a dictionary contains a lot more information on its entries than a single word equivalent, and, in the case of nouns, a plural prefix, which is useful for the learner. The chapters also contain cultural information that is necessary for the correct use of the language, such as the distinction between ordinary greetings (hujambo? or habari gani?) and 'shikamoo' greetings reserved for parents, the elderly and religious or community leaders. Finally, there is a key to the practice exercises of each chapter.

Chapter 1 includes a very brief introduction to the history and structure of Swahili ('About Swahili'), referring to the basics such as that Swahili is a Bantu language, has a long written history, and has been much influenced by Arabic and English, and, to a lesser extent, by Portuguese, German, Hindi and Persian. The chapter describes the large areas of East, Central and Southern Africa where Swahili is spoken as a first or second language, and its dialects ('more than 15'). The introduction also describes other aspects of Swahili and East African culture and society that are useful knowledge for the student of the language. Unfortunately, the very first page of the book contains an error of information or transcription; in order to demonstrate how closely related the structure of Swahili (nouns) is to that of other Bantu languages, the authors erroneously claim that the word for person/people in Kikuyu (Gĩkũyũ), a language spoken in Kenya, is muntu/abato, whereas in fact the correct equivalent is mũndũ/andũ.

In the forty chapters, the book covers the most important elements of Swahili morphosyntax, including a separate chapter for each Swahili verb form: passive, stative, causative, prepositional, and reciprocal (which the book's blurb somewhat inaccurately describes as 'various verb typologies'); basic tenses (present, past, future); conditional tenses (nge, ngali and -ki-), as well as the-ka tense, which is unique to Swahili and Bantu languages; and the subjunctive tense/mood. Interestingly, the indefinite present tense, also known as a- tense, is described in Chapter 33 ('Additional tenses and their negation') rather than in Chapter 5 alongside the ordinary present tense; after all, the difference between the two is aspectual and is often ignored in real, ordinary usage. In this chapter we find the-me- tense described as the 'already tense' to refer to the equivalent of 'present perfect tense' in English. The final chapters cover the uses of diminutive, augmentative and collective nouns. It also includes a list of proverbs with their literal meanings and longer interpretations or explanations in English. In these respects, the book covers all the important elements of Swahili grammar.

The distinction between certain 'native' and 'borrowed' words of Swahili, principally verbs and adjectives, is found to be necessary in most descriptions of the language because it has a bearing on morphosyntactic processes such as derivation and concord. However, the use of the term 'Bantu verbs' (p. 241) to distinguish the two is paradoxical, since Swahili is a Bantu language in the first place, and the majority of its stock of vocabulary is of African origin. Marked structure or behaviour is found in Arabic loans (for example, verbs do not end with a final-a, as with indigenous Swahili verbs, and therefore follow slightly different rules of inflection). It would be better to refer to the former simply as (Swahili...