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What follows is an hypothesis about the origins of the Swahili language. Since Swahili is a Bantu language, its roots are to be sought in Africa, not the Islamic homelands. Hence reference to external influence is minimised in this study. Coastal people, being Muslims, would object that a language cannot be so crudely separated from the culture of the community carrying the language.
To this we would answer that the culture of any community may now be rather different from that of the linguistic ancestors of the community. Both language and culture are modified over the centuries.
What we are interested in here is primarily linguistic evidence for certain aspects of the language and culture of the early Swahili community before it was touched in a major way by extra-African influences.
A Swahili is here defined linguistically,2 as a speaker of one of the primary dialects of Swahili, namely, from north to south: i. Unguja Zanzibar town and island, adjoining mainland: the basis for Standard Swahili.
