Some Problems of Transitivity in Swahili

First Published in 2004. The following essay is a tentative study of a little explored area of the delicate syntactic properties of transitivity for the language, Swahili.

In eastern Africa the role of Swahili is a complicated one: it is spoken as a first language by a relatively small number of people, perhaps a million, living mainly along the East African littoral and on the off-shore islands of Pemba, Zanzibar and Mafia.

It is spoken as a second language by a much larger number of people, in excess of ten million, in up-country Tanzania and Kenya, most of whom speak as a first language, a Bantu language more or less closely related to it.

It is spoken as a third language by an indeterminate but probably quite large number of people (certainly in excess of a million) in Uganda, the Congo (Kinshasa) Republic and the Nilotic-speaking areas of Kenya.