Is Kiswahili tonal?

 

Kiswahili is easy to learn. Tone is not used for distinguishing meaning between words in Kiswahili. For words with more than one meaning, the meaning can easily be discerned from the context. For example, paa - roof, antelope(nouns); fly(verb).

When writing short and long vowels - Where there is an underlying long vowel it is represented by two similar vowels, otherwise all vowels are written as single vowels. For example, kanga - fowl; kaanga - fry.

Kiswahili is currently mainly written in Latin script. In Kiswahili orthography, there are five vowels like the ones found in English as well as all the consonants in English except c-, q-, x-. Moreover, additional consonants include ch-, dh-, gh-, ng’-, ny-, sh-, th-. These are found in the standard dialect used for teaching and learning. Other consonant combinations may be found in various other dialects.

The tables below are retrieved from a monograph presenting a proposed unified orthography for the Kenyan Bantu languages, which include Gĩkũyũ (GK), Kĩkamba (KK), Ekegusii (EK), Kikuria (KR), Kĩmeru (MR), Kĩembu (EM) Luhya group of languages (LY), Dawida' group of languages (DW), MijiKenda group of languages (MJ) and Kiswahili (KS)