How are Yoruba and Kiswahili related?
I’ve been coming to Kenya every year since 2015. But never for more than a few days at a time. On this visit, I have been here more than a month.
I already have a Safaricom line and mPesa from previous visits. I even have a Luo name, given to me by my hosts upcountry. So I figured that I might as well learn Kiswahili while I’m here.
The good news is that Kiswahili is one of the easiest languages in the world to learn. The bad news is that I am already learning French, and I’ve gotten far enough along that I can read tweets in French. Somehow, I’m afraid that if I attempt to learn them simultaneously, I’ll end up mastering neither in reasonable time.
That did not stop me from checking cracking the door open and taking a peek. Now I have enough Kiswahili that I’ve begun to recognise words on the news,, or even start a conversation...which is really not a good idea right now. Once I go “Mambo” and the respondent goes “Poa sana" or “Nzuri”, that’s pretty much a wrap for me. The bad thing about starting a conversation in a language you don’t have conversational fluency in is that people assume that you can speak it, and they go off 100 miles per hour until they notice that you are confused, and that’s super awkward. So I’ve stopped doing that.
Not long into my Kiswahili studies, I realised that it has significant structural similarities to my native language, Yoruba. Because I don’t know a past participle from a constable, I can’t say what exactly is going on in grammatical terms.
Turns out that I’m not the only one who’s noticed. Kola Tubosun who is a linguist also noticed and documented the similarities in syntax and parallel words he discovered in this super informative blog post. Kiswahili word for meat is Nyama. In Yoruba, we’ve got Nama. Kiswahili’s Nani and Nini which loosely translate to “what is” and “something” sound a lot like Yoruba’s Tani (who’s that?) and Kini (“something”, or “what is it”, depending on how it is intoned).
A number of interesting theories about how these similarities occurred are discussed in the conversation under that original Tweet. I have since left the research to the linguists and anthropologists, but I hope that they and other interested persons will one day uncover the relationship between the two languages and cultures.
PS:
I’m learning Kiswahili and French with Duolingo, for now.
The biggest difference I’ve noticed between Kiswahili and Yoruba — the former is phonetic…the words sound exactly they way they look, which makes it easy to learn. Yoruba on the other hand is tonal, and some words can mean up to twenty different things, depending on they are said. Welp.
