Making Swahili visible: Identity, language and the internet · Global Voices
Tree roots cling to a 15th-century wall on Kilwa Kisiwani Island, Tanzania. In 1981, the ruins of the powerful Swahili sultanate on the island were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Image by <PERSON>, January 1, 2017, CC BY 2.0.
Editor’s note: This personal essay was written following a Twitter campaign organized by Global Voices sub-Saharan Africa and Rising Voices where each week, a different language activist shared their perspectives on the intersection of digital rights and African Languages as part of the project, “The identity matrix: Platform regulation of online threats to expression in Africa.”
According to the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), linguistic and cultural diversity are of strategic importance for people around the world to strengthen the unity and cohesion of societies.
This linguistic and cultural diversity propelled the UNESCO general conference to proclaim International Mother Language Day ( IMLD ) in November 1999, to be commemorated annually on February 21 annually. To bolster IMLD, the United Nations (UN) declared the International Year of Indigenous Languages ( IYIL 2019 ), to draw attention to the endangerment of the world’s indigenous languages.
Today, there are over 7,100 languages spoken around the world, 28 percent of which are spoken on the African continent alone. Despite this, English dominates online spaces in the region. Some twenty years ago, 80 percent of the world’s online content was English-centric. 696
Currently, however, English content online is said to have shrunk to between 51- 55 percent.
4/4 English
Can we argue that more people are yearning to get online in their local languages? And is it true that 17 M people worldwide have no reason to get online, https://t.co/owzk24xch4
— GV SSAfrica (@gvssafrica) May 19, 2020
The million-dollar question, therefore, is: Could this sharp drop be an indicator that people now favor their native languages online over English, considering that less than 15 percent of the world population speaks English as their first language ?
Swahili: Coming to birth?
Swahili is recognized as one of the official languages ​​of the African Union (AU), alongside English, Portuguese, French, Spanish and Arabic. Swahili is also the lingua franca for East Africa Community (EAC) member states.
Rwanda, an EAC member, saw its lower legislative house approve a law making Swahili an official language in 2017 – in addition to Kinyarwanda, French and English. Besides being used for administrative purposes, Swahili will be incorporated into Rwanda’s school curriculum.
In Uganda, the government in September 2019 approved the establishment of the National Swahili Council. Article 6 (2) of the Constitution of Uganda also spells out that “Swahili shall be the second official language in Uganda to be used in such circumstances as Parliament may by law prescribe.”
In 2018, South Africa, which boasts 11 official languages, formalized Swahili as an optional subject in its curriculum, starting in 2020. In 2019, the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) adopted Swahili as its fourth official language.
Swahili invisibility online
Karibu Nairobi. Image by <PERSON>, September 20, 2019, (CC BY-ND 2.0)
Despite Swahili being the most widely spoken African language, with approximately 150 million speakers – mostly in East Africa, the Great Lakes region, southern Somalia, and some parts of Southern Africa, its visibility online is dismal.
<PERSON>, a lecturer at the Multimedia University of Kenya, states in an op-ed with the Nation, a Kenyan daily, that the absence of online linguistic and cultural diversity creates “a society with a ‘tunnel-vision’ view of the world.”
<PERSON> predicts that most indigenous cultures end up surrendering “their identities to the ‘English way’ of doing things.” This sad reality can only be reversed if indigenous civilizations “fight to retain their identities both online and offline,” he says.
Join our co-founder for a Tweetchat on identity, language and digital rights in Africa starting tomorrow.
For Swahili, visit https://t.co/pjjxAsMAva https://t.co/pvHOpbxi6x
— Centre for Youth Empowerment and Leadership (CYEL) (@cyelke) May 17, 2020
But all is not gloom and doom. There are some dedicated organizations at the forefront of promoting and developing Swahili online. 424