Oh Kiswahili...

As the majority of Kiswahili speakers I’ve ever met have told me, Swahili is an “easy” language to learn. And in spite of often garbled sentences I produce when attempting to make myself understood in Kiswahili, I have to agree with them. Especially compared to English and its inexhaustible rules, exceptions, odd spellings, homonyms, homophones, and all the rest of its quirks, Kiswahili is a breeze: mercifully devoid of exceptions to its rules, wonderfully phonetic, and no gender (yes, I’m scowling at you, French…). While its noun classes do mix things up a little bit, they at least behave the way you’d expect them to once you learn the grammar. On top of all that, it’s also a simple language where vocabulary is concerned. My Swahili to English dictionary is literally less than 1/3 the size of my English to Swahili dictionary. Where in English we could say good, fine, great, excellent, superior, first-rate, decent, pleasant, enjoyable, lovely, delightful, skillful, proficient, accomplished, helpful, beneficial, advantageous, fair, well-mannered, wonderful, fantastic, magnificent, terrific, and so on, in Kiswahili they say “nzuri” … or, to lend that a little extra weight, “nzuri sana.” We say put, place, set, lay, position, situation, plant, deposit, leave, plunk, etc., and they say “-weka.” Depending on the modifier that it’s paired with, the verb root “-piga” can mean anything from hit to haggle, from vote to kneel, from underline to clap, from make a phone call to brushing teeth … and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. Synonyms are not a key feature of the Kiswahili language. In fact, I highly doubt there is a word that means “synonym.” Its vocabulary is like a set of linguistic lowest common denominators. (Although I have come to appreciate this particular aspect of Kiswahili, my adjustment to it was rather slow in coming thanks in large part to Mrs. Streiff’s deeply ingrained lessons on sentence-opening variety…)

When it comes to greetings though, all that goes flying out the window. I keep telling myself that in time I’ll actually become familiar with all the possible greetings in Kiswahili. I keep telling myself this in spite of the fact that even now – after having already spent a cumulative total of more than 16 weeks here – new ones keep getting thrown my way. And for all that the rest of the Kiswahili lexicon might be slightly lacking in nuance, it is available in abundant supply with the greetings. I’m sure I’ll accidentally leave some out, but so far the list includes: shikamoo (if they’re older than me), hujambo, salama, habari, habari yako, habari gani, habari za asubuhi, habari za kazi, habari za siku hizi, habari za mchana, habari za jioni, habari za usiku, habari za nyumbani, mzima, mambo, mambo vipi, vipi, hali, upo, umelala salama, umelalaje, umeamkaje, umeshindaje, uko bomba (slang-ish), uko fresh (slang-ish), shwari (slang-ish), shwanga (slang-ish), mwakae (Kiha), mwidiwe (Kiha), kavubu (Kiha), and ulimo (Kiha). The kicker is that with the exception of shikamoo and the Kiha words (which obviously aren’t Kiswahili, but get used a lot out here), you can get away with responding with “salama” to any of those greetings. There are a handful of other responses, but salama’s the one-size-fits-all answer.

You might have guessed by now that greetings are a pretty big part of the culture here. Just about every time you see/pass a person here (regardless of whether or not you know them), exchanging 2 or 3 or more greetings is par for the course. It’s one of the little things that I really like about this culture, and I especially loved how thrilled the women usually get when I greet them in Kiha (I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard them exclaim “she knows Kiha!” in Swahili as I walk away. Sadly, that is not the case – I only know four words of Kiha, and all of them are greetings…). The only problem I have with the greetings comes up when someone throws a new one at me. Rationally, I know that the majority of the greetings make sense once they’re broken down. And I also know that I can almost definitely just respond with “salama” and be fine. I know all this and yet still, 9 times out of 10, my brain reacts to a new greeting by blowing a fuse. Which usually means I end up sputtering helplessly until the person who launched said tricky greeting in my direction either walks past or takes pity on me and tells me the appropriate response. Without fail, the meaning of the word or phrase becomes painfully clear to me shortly thereafter – too late to be useful, just in time to make me feel extra foolish :-/

Some other fun facts about and/or quirks of Kiswahili:
• The word for university is chuo kikuu, which can be abbreviated to chuo (chew-o (2 syllables)). The word for toilet is choo (ch-owe (1 syllable)). The only good thing about this similarity is that it doesn’t tend to be a mistake you make more than once.
• Likewise, the word for pomegranate is uncomfortably similar to a rather course insult. Thanks to my awareness of this (which is thanks to an angry ice-cream vendor I overheard in Dar...), I will probably never use the word for pomegranate out of fear of the Freudian slip I might make. There is a silver lining to the paranoia though – my “Swahili street cred” went through the roof when Tabitha realized what it was that I thought she’d called the pomegranate,
• The verb for open is –fungua. The verb for close is –funga. I can’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve mixed those up.
• For all that there isn’t gender in Kiswahili, it is considered grammatically incorrect to use the active verb –oa (to marry) when a woman is the subject. The correct verb is –olewa (passive voice). In Kiswahili, men can marry, but women can only be married. Sexist grammar … cute, huh?
• For some reason that continues to escape me, many Swahili speakers confuse their L’s and their R’s, especially when speaking English. This one wouldn’t baffle me as much if both letters weren’t used in Swahili … but they are … and with distinct sounds! For example, although everyone pronounces the "r" in my name, on more than one occasion, people at my office have spelled my name as "Katheline." More recent example of this: the secretary (a cute, sweet woman) walked into my office yesterday, put a stack of papers down, and cheerfully informed me that she was coming in on Saturday to do “firing.” Wow, I thought. She’s pretty excited about getting rid of someone. And then I realized she meant “filing.” She was still more enthusiastic about it than I would’ve expected, but hey, to each her own :-)
• On a related (but only tangentially) note, I keep running into two things here and wondering how/why the colonizers succeeded at importing them here while the colonists failed to do so in America. The first: the British “R.” For those of you who have yet to encounter the British “R,” it is basically an entirely different sound. This can make communication difficult at times. The second: the metric system. I try to console myself by remembering that I’ve never been very good at judging temperature, distance, weight, etc. regardless of the units, but seriously! I wish I could’ve been in the room when the decision got made to scrap the perfectly good – and more importantly, logical and universally-used – system of measurement in favor of a whole new system that isn’t logical in the least and doesn’t even convert easily to metric. I wish I could’ve been there so I could’ve shaken some sense into whoever it was who thought this was a good idea. I'm looking at you, Thomas Corwin Mendenhall. Harumph.