What is the meaning of the term Swahili?

 

Beyond Cana… the land recedes greatly, there follows a deep bay stretching a great way across, which is called “Sachalites” – a Hellenized word for Arabic “Sahil” (coast), what appears in east Africa as Sawahil.

-The periplus of the Erythrean sea, translated from Greek by Wilfred H. Schoff

The Arabic word Sawahil metamorphosed into Swahili, meaning coast. This is an Arabic term that was used to describe the geographical area of the coast of East Africa, and by extension associated with the peoples who lived in that area. The Kiswahili word for ‘coast’ is Pwaa; and rendered as Pwani to denote place. The suffix (-ni) in Kiswahili is added to nouns to indicate ‘place’. For example, ‘nyumba’ is ‘house’, but ‘nyumbani’ is ‘home’, meaning an actual location. Therefore, in Kiswahili, people living at the coast are known as WaPwani and not Swahili, as it would be in Arabic.

It is by the unfortunate naming of the language from an Arabic term that has reproduced a lot of discrepancies and confusion around this term, attaching to it definitions and identities that are non-existent, and at "best" only exist in imagination. 

This can be bypassed by taking first things first (the meaning and origin of the word) where we can see that the word merely represents a geographical expression. The same way people living in New York may be referred to as New Yorkers, or Nairobi as Nairobians, is the same way people living in “Sahil/Sawahil” came to be referred to as “Swahilis” in various texts. This is despite their varied ethnicities and cultural and religious backgrounds.

The coasts of East Africa today go by the Kiswahili term Pwani. The people living there being referred to as Wapwani. The language Kiswahili remains a lingua franca/trading language throughout East and Central Africa.