Introducing Swahili Grammar

Learning Swahili can be difficult to begin with, because the grammar is very different from that of European languages. Once you’re used to the way it works, the good news is that there are very few exceptions to the rules – unlike English.

Here are a few basic points about how Swahili works:

1) There are no articles (a/an, the).  Mtoto can therefore mean child, a child, or the child.

2) One of the most common words you'll see is the "A of association" (-a).  Depending on the class of the noun it follows, it can be ya, wa, la, cha, vya, or za, and its function is to link the words before and after it. Usually it can be translated as "of".  E.g.

Mtoto wa jirani    -  the child of the neighbour (the neighbour's child)
Duka la vitabu     -  shop of books (bookshop)
Habari za leo       -  the news of today (today's news)

NB. The word 'na' means 'and', and is not an A of association.

3) Swahili nouns fall into one of six noun classes.  Each class has its own rules, so nouns behave differently depending on the rules of the noun class they belong to.

One example of this is plurals: the plural of mtoto (child) is watoto, because it belongs to the M-WA class.  The plural of mti (tree) is miti, because it belongs to the M-MI class. The plural of kitabu (book) is vitabu, because it belongs to the KI-VI class. When you begin learning Swahili this can be very frustrating, because you can’t predict what the plural of a noun will be until you have become familiar with each noun class. The same goes for words that describe a noun, including 'this' and 'that', and most adjectives.

4) Verbs do a lot of work in Swahili. You do not have to use a personal pronoun (I, you, he, she etc.) because it is contained in the verb.  If there is an object pronoun in the sentence (e.g. I saw her) this also becomes part of the verb.  For example:

ninakupenda  =  I like/love you

NI  +  NA                                      + KU                    +  PENDA

‘I’   +   present tense marker  + you (object)  +  like/love (verb stem)

Because of this structure, you need to have some idea of how these affixes work before you can use a dictionary.  In this case, to find the meaning of the verb you would look up “penda”.

5) Verbs can also have several forms which alter their meaning. The most common variation changes the verb from active to passive: “penda” is the basic form of the verb ‘like/love’, while “pendwa” means ‘to be liked/loved’.  Another carries the meaning of 'causing someone to do something': the verb "soma" means to read or learn, and "somesha" means to cause someone to learn, i.e. to teach. Once you know the rules, you can often guess the meaning of new verbs.