ENGLISH. SIL Ethnologue (2009) reports the largest communities of native speakers in Kenya as follows: It’s the birthplace of the Swahili language and a very linguistically diverse country.The languages belonging to the Bantu branch of the The second largest group of languages is the Nilotic group which consists of languages spoken by 31% of the Kenyan population.
The language is the native language among members of the Agikuyu ethnic group who reside in the central region of the country. Some of the Nilotic languages spoken in Tanzania include Maasai, which is shared among the Maasai group found in both Kenya and Tanzania. Tones, which are much more prevalent in Asian languages like Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese, are different pitches applied to syllables, meaning that the same words could have different meanings depending on the pitch used to pronounce them.As a bit of trivia, the Kikuyu language was used in the 1983 Star Wars movie “Return Of The Jedi” where a character called Nien Nunb speaks a few lines in the language.
The Swahili language is also used as the lingua franca by most people in the country. TRANSLATE. The language is taught in Schools, where children learn to speak it in its Standard Zanzibar-accent. They are both second languages to most Kenyans who speak them and function as a kind of Lingua Francas in the country. Like Swahili, Kikuyu is also categorized as a Bantu language under the Niger-Congo language group. The community consists of mainly Yemenis and Omanis and their numbers are close to 60.000.As mentioned above, a large number of Somali migrants equally reside in Kenya, but other Somali speakers are native to Kenyan soil. Bantu languages spoken in the country include Bemba, Safwa, Digo, Hehe, Makonde, Nyamwezi, Yao, and Luguru, among others. English was introduced in the country after Kenya became a British colony in the 19th century. SAID. The language is also recognized by law as the official language in the country. KLINGON. TEA. People who speak English as a first language in Kenya are very few, and are limited mostly to English and American immigrants.Swahili is the most widely spoken language in Kenya, and it’s a Lingua Franca spoken by people all over East Africa as a second language.Kenyans refer to their language as Kiswahili, the prefix “ki” signifying “language”. Other Nilotic languages include Datooga, Ngasa, Ogiek, Kisankasa, and Pare. CREE.
Today, it is also spoken by the cosmopolitan and well-educated population of most bigger cities, and it has even spread to Tanzania and Uganda.The name “Sheng” is derived from a combination of the two words “Sheng builds on a Swahili structure but adapts English vocabulary in different ways to form a slang-filled accent As mentioned, almost 70 languages are spoken in Kenya, and depending on what you qualify as a “language” as opposed to a “dialect” the number could be even higher.In the following I’m going to go through some of the regional languages spoken by ethnic minorities and different tribes and peoples in Kenya. This diverse ethnic composition makes the country a multilingual country with many different languages used within its borders. English is the primary language used in formal conversations in the country and is also the language used in the drafting of legal documents and during court proceedings. The official languages are English, which is widely spoken to a high standard in the tourist industry, and KiSwahili, an East African lingua franca that originates from the coast and spread inland along trade routes in the early 19th century. The total number of native Luhya speakers in Kenya is estimated to be 1.2 million people. The language is used natively by the Swahili ethnic group who inhabit the coastal region of the country.
Those that are, despite being different, are mutually intelligible.For a couple of short examples of sentences in the Luhya language, watch the video below.Kipokomo, a Bantu language, is a descendant of the Kingozi language which is said to have been the language on which Swahili has its roots. The Nilotic branch of languages belong to the Arabic, Hindustani, Punjabi and a variety of other languages including English (as a first language) are also found in Kenya and are mostly spoken by more or less recent immigrants.In the following, I’m going to dive into the linguistic landscape of Kenya, have a look at some of the major languages and try to give you an overview of them.The two official languages in Kenya are English and Swahili.