Talk:Swahili

Number of users

A requester in ticket:2023082210010407 has asked for changes, that there are 200 million speakers of this language per this refernce: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000379702. — xaosflux ^Talk 13:29, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

I concur, that is a far more recent reference than the one cited in the article. I noticed that it was updated but changed back by @Cookiemonster1618. @Cookiemonster1618 any particular reason why? Thuralt (talk) 07:44, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

it was changed because it's an over estimate and Ethnologue source is being used because first off there is not a large number of second language speakers of Swahili in the DRC so it wouldn't be possible for there to be 200 million speakers of Swahili also Ethnologue estimate of second language speakers is accurate because not all the inhabitants of these countries speak swahili as a first or second language. Cookiemonster1618 (talk) 14:01, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

Doesn't seem likely that it's an over estimation. Tanzania alone has a population of over 61 million and 61.4% (over 37 million) of Tanzanians speak Swahili as a first language. Kenya, in 2019, had a population of over 47 million and 27.1% (over 12 million) of Kenyans speak Swahili as a first language. Uganda has approx. 34 million Swahili speakers. And this is not counting Burundi, DRC, Mozambique etc.

The Ethnologue source simply isn't accurate Thuralt (talk) 14:49, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

Uganda doesnt have 34 million speakers your estimate is not accurate in fact because you have no source to cite it. Since Ethnologue takes its data from census and other data provided by its users its more reliable. The Ethnologue estimation will be used for now. Cookiemonster1618 (talk) 16:30, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

According to Ethnologue Uganda has 4.3 million second language swahili speakers and only 4,340 first language speakers. So where did you get your figure of 34 million speakers of Swahili in Uganda from? Cookiemonster1618 (talk) 16:32, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

According to Ethnologue's source from the 2019 census there were only 111,000 first language speakers of Swahili in Kenya and 19 million second language speakers so where did you get your figure of 12 million from? Cookiemonster1618 (talk) 16:34, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

All figures I've cited are referenced in my reply from recent reliable sources (Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, Tanzania National Bureau of Statistics, Statistica, USAID).

Also, the UNESCO source cited by @Xaosflux above is recent and reliable and also gives the overall number of speakers at 200 million Thuralt (talk) 17:10, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

Hi Xaosflux care to weigh in? I've found this other BBC source. I'm inclined to make a good faith revert of Cookiemonster1618's edit to reflect these other more recent sources but I would prefer some level of consensus before I do. Thuralt (talk) 12:28, 18 November 2023 (UTC)

I'm not really interested in this topic, only was here to provide information from the VRT request in passing. — xaosflux ^Talk 11:27, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

@Thuralt I just came across this. I seriously doubt 200,000,000 is an accurate estimate. It seems to be a maximalist claim similar to claims that English has 2 billion speakers. If you add up anyone who might have studied any amount of Swahili, maybe you get 200 million, but as an accurate estimate of L1+L2 speakers, no. The UNESCO document you've linked is not an academic study and gives no sources to document its claim as to the number of speakers, so it should not be used. Ethnologue is IMO much more reliable. Benwing (talk) 03:44, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

You should be aware that there's a strong impulse on the part of speakers and advocates for a given language to inflate speaker numbers. Academically-oriented sources are very important for this reason. Benwing (talk) 03:46, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

Benwing There are important RS sources that contradict the Ethnologue numbers. If speakers (primary and overall) from just three countries alone (see the other sources above but happy to recite) add up to 83 million (I should add that even this number is likely an underestimation since the Kenya census was conducted over four years ago and the estimates for Kenya and Tanzania are just for primary speakers alone) without including speakers from countries such as Burundi, DRC, Mozambique, Somalia etc then the >200 million number becomes likely (perhaps even evident).

I'll also look for more RS sources on the number of speakers in the other Eastern Africa countries and L2 speakers in Kenya and Tanzania. Thuralt (talk) 05:10, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

@Thuralt I don't have time to argue with someone who sounds rather biased but I will just point out you're essentially conducting OR by trying to add up the speakers from countries like Burundu, DRC, etc. where Swahili isn't widely spoken. I have been to Kenya and quite a lot of people there don't speak Swahili (Tanzania is different, everyone speaks Swahili as it's the national language, whereas de facto English functions in this role in Kenya). I also have a Ph.D. in linguistics and no axe to grind here. The UNESCO source you provided is not a reliable source for this stuff as its claim isn't backed up by any citations. You need to find an actual reliable source that says 200+ million L2 speakers (since the number of L1 speakers is ~ 15,000,000) and not try to add stuff up yourself by picking and choosing sources. Ethnologue is a reliable source that provides such an aggregate, and the fact that you have no interest in even presenting differing views in the lede about speakers but have only chosen the maximalist claim shows your bias. Benwing (talk) 08:45, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

Benwing Just stop. If you "don't want to waste your time" engaging, that's fine. And if you disagree with my point of view, that's fine too. But don't ascribe bias just because I disagree with you. You don't know me anymore than I know you. So stop.

But just in case you still do want to engage on the merits, I'm happy to have your perspective; I just don't agree with it for reasons I've stated (and referenced) above but I'll add to here; BBC, Harvard, SOAS, University of London, The East African and Citizen newspapers all quote Swahili speakers at atleast 200 million. The fact is, there is a preponderance of reliable sources that contradict the Ethnologue source, which is why I don't consider it having an accurate estimate of Swahili speakers. — Preceding unsigned comment added by [[User:{{{1}}}|{{{1}}}]] ([[User talk:{{{1}}}#top|talk]] • [[Special:Contributions/{{{1}}}|contribs]])

@Cookiemonster1618, Benwing, Benwing2, and Thuralt: Hi, all. I have rewritten the section following this WP:RSN discussion, to incorporate more reliable sources and note the general range of figures, since in general when reliable sources give a range of figures we should acknowledge that and not cherry-pick a figure, particularly from one extreme of the range. -sche (talk) 01:09, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

Hi -sche fine with that. Seems reasonable. I, however, don't seem to understand why 150 million has been stated as the highest extremum, when the Harvard African Language Program, The SOAS (University of London) Swahili programme and BBC all quote figures starting at 200 million.

I should add that the BBC page indicates that it was written/updated in February 2022 and the SOAS Swahili Programme page indicates that it was written/updated in June 2023. Thuralt (talk) 02:13, 28 June 2024 (UTC)

The body (Swahili_language#Overview) gives the full range, "Estimates [...] vary widely, from as low as 50 million to as high as 200 million, but generally range from 60 million to 150 million." For the summary in the lead of where the estimates "generally rang[e]", I looked at where most of the higher-quality estimates fall, and what the one reference that acknowledges estimates vary gives as the range: ~60 to 150. -sche (talk) 03:10, 28 June 2024 (UTC)

-sche I would contend that Harvard and the University of London (maybe even the BBC) are equally credible RS sources. And also for consistency, it would seem reasonable to put the full range throughout the article instead of picking a single range from one source. Thuralt (talk) 03:28, 28 June 2024 (UTC)

Orthography section needs work

The orthography section currently discusses the disused Arabic orthography in far greater detail than is needed for this page. Conversely, it barely discusses the Latin orthography at all. Readers are given no indication what sounds the Latin letters represent. It's just noted that digraphs exist, but not what they are used for.--Ermenrich (talk) 20:20, 24 June 2024 (UTC)

Swahili or Kiswahili?

In the Kenya Section of this page the term Swahili suddenly changes to Kiswahili with no explanation. Generally in English the Swahili language is referred to a Swahili. If you ask the Cambridge Dictionary the meaning of Kiswahili you get a link to the Cambridge Dictionary page on Swahili. Interestingly, if you do the same on the Webster´s Dictionary there is a Kiswahili entry with the meaning being Swahili and some information that the origin of the word Swahili is Arabic. However, since the Swahili language in the Constitution of Kenya or at least the Kenya Law Reform Commission´s web page (in English) is referred to as Kiswahili that does bring the use of the spelling and term Kiswahili into modern English usage because many (mostly Kenyan) English speakers will refer to that page. It seems that the lawyers, politicians and Kenya government personnel did not check their use of the term Kiswahili in English dictionaries and may not have referred first to English professors at the various universities and colleges in Kenya that offer courses in English language and literature before using of the term Kiswahili in English - or maybe they did? Anyway, as a result the use of the term Kiswahili when referring to Swahili on the Kenya section as a result is correct. These days use of some words in English can result in heated debate. Do we change names in English (perhaps partly due to guilt today or ignorance during the colonial era) to the nearest "real" name or do we keep the "English" name? English is a fairly tolerant language and if words or used or understood enough they easily make their way into an English dictionary and are accepted. Some languages (e.g. French and Spanish) have an official government body that decides which words are allowed in their language. The Republic of Turkey has officially changed the name of their [to Türkiye] because perhaps they don´t like the country´s name sounding like a bird to English speakers, however most English speakers continue to use the word Turkey for the country. Apparently the name for England in Turkish is İngiltere. Should they change that to a spelling that is identical to the word England in English? The Swahili people place a ki- prefix in front of a root word for a people or nation or tribe in order to refer to the language of that people. Hence the language of the Swahili people is kiswahili. I have heard people say that the Swahili language (in English) should be Kiswahili. Should it? The word for English (generic) is ingereza in Swahili so the English language is kiingereza. Does that mean that in Swahili (or Kiswahili) the English language should be changed to Inglish or kiinglish sor omething sounding similar and not be allowed to say kiingereza, or should we allow Swahili speakers to decide themselves? In general Swahili in the English language is referred to as "Swahili" and until there is a change in its common usage I don´t really see a need to change that. Thankfully that seems to be the case in this Wikipedia article on the Swahili language. Kengele (talk)

References

Requested move 9 September 2025

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: moved. There is a weak consensus to move to Swahili & move the disambiguation page to Swahili (disambiguation). But other proposal have no consensus at all (non-admin closure) Ophyrius (he/him
T • C • G) 15:18, 23 September 2025 (UTC)

---

Swahili language → KiswahiliKiswahili – Clear common name. For those curious, Ki- is equivalent to "language". Ngrams gives over a 10x lead for Kiswahili. Google Scholar agrees and gives 127,000 hits for "Kiswahili", 11,400 hits for "Swahili language". WP:UE says that a word of foreign origin can be used for a title if it's the common name (and a loan word predominantly used in English-language sources is English). Kowal2701 (talk) 21:49, 9 September 2025 (UTC).

There was a previous RM on this in 2015, I'm not sure any of the opposing arguments in it are valid. WP:NCLANG says "language" is to be used as a natural disambiguator, not that it's always recommended. Kowal2701 (talk) 21:54, 9 September 2025 (UTC)

Comment: The English-language version of the Constitution of Kenya refers to the language as "Kiswahili" (here). The English-language version of the Constitution of Tanzania also refers to "Kiswahili" (PDF download, page 43). The Constitution of Uganda refers to the language as "Swahili" (The Constitution (Amendment) Act, 2005, page 4).

Ethnologue lists "Swahili" (swa, swh, swc); Glottolog lists "Swahili" (swah1254, swah1253) with multiple alternative names; Encyclopaedia Britannica lists "Swahili language" (Swahili language) with "kiSwahili", "Kiswahili", "Kiswahili language" and "kiSwahili language" as alternative names.

Realistically, I think the most WP:COMMONNAME in English is just "Swahili", but that's currently a disambiguation page. According to WP:NCLANG:

Articles on language varieties (i.e. languages, dialects or sociolects) can be titled with the bare name of the variety where this is unambiguous (e.g. Bokmål) or where it is unquestionably the primary topic for the name (e.g. Arabic, Kannada, Serbo-Croatian). In other cases, where the language is not the primary topic, a natural disambiguator like "... language" is preferred (e.g. French language).

I would say, in this case, there's an argument that the language is the primary topic... Pageviews, for instance, are pretty unambiguous, as are WikiNav outgoing pageviews from the DAB (Swahili). If consensus could be reached that the language is the primary topic, then in theory it could be moved to Swahili and the DAB could be moved to Swahili (disambiguation). Pineapple Storage (talk) 16:53, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

I hadn't wanted to !vote before as I wasn't sure, but researching usage has clarified things for me; I think I'm now going to oppose a move to KiswahiliKiswahili, but I'm still neutral on Swahili languageSwahili language vs Swahili as I don't really have an opinion on whether WP:COMMONNAME or WP:CONSISTENT should take priority. There's maybe a separate discussion to be had about whether WP:NCLANG should be reworked to (more explicitly) allow languages to take the ambiguous pagename per WP:PRIMARYTOPIC and push the DAB to "_ (disambiguation)" where usage of the name by itself almost always refers to the language. Pineapple Storage (talk) 17:34, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

• Move to Swahili per WP:PRIMARYTOPIC and move the dab page to Swahili (disambiguation). Pineapple Storage's comment above is exactly right. The Ngrams linked in the request are somewhat misleading in that "Kiswahili" is compared to "Swahili language" even though the language is often referred to as simply "Swahili". The same chart with Swahili added shows an overwhelming use of "Swahili" and also that "Swahili language" is used much more often that "Kiswahili language". And yes, "Swahili" can include uses that are not the language, but it's certainly not the case that "Kiswahili" is used 10 times more often in English. "Swahili" is the much more common name. Most readers searching for the language are going to search for "Swahili" and most readers searching for "Swahili" are expecting the language. Station1 (talk) 19:04, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

  "Kiswahili language" would be like saying "Swahili language language". Putting "Swahili" into ngrams is very misleading as it includes all cases where a sentence says "Swahili people", "Swahili culture", "Swahili city-states" etc. Taking into consideration that "Swahili" is only used 5x more than Kiswahili according to ngrams, even though it is used for loads of separate topics, I can't see how it could be the common name. Pageviews aren't the only criteria for primary topics, and I doubt there are any other cases where a language gets primary topic over its ethnic group. Kowal2701 (talk) 19:16, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

  Only if someone already speaks Swahili would they know that "Kiswahili language" was redundant. For the vast majority of English-speakers it's not. And I acknowledged that "Swahili" includes some references to things other than the language, but even discounting for those uses, all the data taken together - pageviews, Wikinav, Ngrams, Google searches - points to "Swahili" being the common name for the language and the language being the primary topic. Station1 (talk) 19:35, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

  The language is certainly very significant given Swahilisation and it being the only official African language of the African Union (also has ~100 million speakers despite the ethnic population only being 2 million ), if there were to be a case where the language is the primary topic this'd be a good contender, but I'm not convinced Kowal2701 (talk) 19:50, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

  If we isolate the ngrams to bi/trigrams that only ever refer to the language, it still suggests Swahili is more common... For instance:

  • speak(s) _
  • _ speaker(s)
  • speaker(s) of _
  • _ word(s)
  • read _
  • _ literature
  • learn(ing) _ and (according to this search and this search, "and" is the only word that frequently follows all of the phrases "learn Swahili", "learn Kiswahili", "learning Swahili" and "learning Kiswahili")
  • _ translation(s)
  • _ dictionar(y/ies)
  • write/written in _
  • written _
  • _ text

  One exception is _ meaning, where "Kiswahili meaning" recently had a spike, but this was very recent and also temporary, so I don't think it can yet be seen to represent a trend. Pineapple Storage (talk) 20:50, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

  Some more phrases I've only just thought of:

  • _ grammar
  • _ vocabulary
  • _ and English / English and _ (this one is more marginal)
  • _ and other languages

  Pineapple Storage (talk) 21:06, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

  Also speaking _ (not sure why I didn't think of that). Pineapple Storage (talk) 00:06, 11 September 2025 (UTC)

  And spoken _ Pineapple Storage (talk) 00:22, 11 September 2025 (UTC)

Notified WP:LINGUISTICS, WP:AFRICA, WP:TANZANIA, WP:KENYA Kowal2701 (talk) 20:59, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose proposed, but weak support Swahili as the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC per views and Wikinav, although also fine with the current. "language" used in the title here is an additional natural disambiguator added to the common name which is just "Swahili", and as Pineapple Storage shows when supplanted with other words for all the other contexts, "Swahili" still is used more than "Kiswahili". DankJae 21:54, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

• My preference for the title of this article would be "Swahili" > "Kiswahili" > "Swahili language". Anecdotally, I've seen Kiswahili gaining traction in academic circles recently, but in general use I feel "Swahili" is much more common, and the ngram data shared by Pineapple Storage seem to bear that out. I think it would make sense to make this article just "Swahili" as the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC, but if people reject that I would weakly support the proposed move here. -- LWG ^talk 23:54, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

  From the sources I've seen, I agree that the use of "Kiswahili" is definitely increasing, particularly in specialised sources; in journal articles and academic books about the linguistics of the language, for instance, the split between the two names might even be 50/50. "Kiswahili" (or even "kiSwahili") may well become the WP:COMMONNAME in general use one day, but as of now I think that threshold is quite far off, because it doesn't seem like awareness of the endonym is widespread among non-specialist sources. Pineapple Storage (talk) 00:33, 11 September 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose the original move and the alternate target of Swahili. I'd reckon "Kiswahili" is used more often than "Swahili language" the same way "English" is used more often than "English language". WP:PRIMARYTOPIC is also not determined by page views because they can be influenced by Wikilink coverage across other articles. When considering that the use of Swahili on Wikipedia almost always includes a link to this article, the claim of this topic being the primary one is less certain. Yue🌙 00:45, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

  WP:DPT specifically recommends number of incoming wikilinks (via Special:WhatLinksHere) and pageviews (traffic) as some of the factors to take into account when determining primary topic status... the use of Swahili on Wikipedia almost always includes a link to this article This fact in itself suggests that Swahili language is the primary topic. Pineapple Storage (talk) 01:01, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

• Neutral, leaning oppose to original proposal but definitely oppose a change in primary topic of the term "Swahili". Srnec (talk) 18:42, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

Oppose Kiswahili, move to Swahili Swahili is the common name, at least in English. Dronebogus (talk) 12:49, 15 September 2025 (UTC)

Support, but strongly support rename to Kiswahili. Kowal2701 has made some convincing points.

Going through the criteria for WP article titles:

• To add to Kowal2701's findings, Kiswahili appears to be more recognizable than Swahili but less so than Swahili language (at least according to Google search results).
• Kiswahili is less ambigous than Swahili (realistically no one confuses Kiswahili with the Swahili culture or people).
• Kiswahili is more consistent with other WP article names for East African languages like Kirundi (not Rundi or Rundi language) & Kinyarwanda.

Pineapple Storage makes some compelling arguments on primary topic but we don't know whether/how many people first tried searching for "Kiswahili" before searching for/seeing Swahili language/Swahili DAB etc since of course there is no Kiswahili WP article.

It could perhaps benefit this discussion to point out that there also appears to be a World Kiswahili Day. Interesting that it's Kiswahili not Swahili Thuralt (talk) 06:46, 18 September 2025 (UTC)

We actually can get an idea of whether/how many people first tried searching for "Kiswahili" before searching for/seeing Swahili language/Swahili DAB etc because KiswahiliKiswahili does already exist as a redirect to Swahili languageSwahili language, so if you type Kiswahili into the Wikipedia search bar and press ↵ Enter, you're sent to Swahili language with a hatnote saying (Redirected from KiswahiliKiswahili). This registers a pageview of the redirect page, which we can then compare to pageviews of the disambiguation page (currently at Swahili) using XTools: this analysis indicates that the disambiguation page (which is where you're sent if you type Swahili into the Wikipedia search bar and press ↵ Enter) is viewed more times than the redirect via KiswahiliKiswahili.

WikiNav Outgoing Pageviews also indicates that the vast majority (as of August 2025, 78.39%) of outgoing navigation from the disambiguation page is to Swahili language. Pineapple Storage (talk) 09:21, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

Fair enough. But it's not exactly comparable. The Kiswahili page is only a redirect, so the comparison wouldn't be apropos. Which is why we can't get WikiNav statistics for it.

Search is a learned behavior. If users are always automatically redirected when they search for something, they will learn to search for the resource to which they're redirected. This, naturally, will affect the pageview statistics of the redirect, in this case the Kiswahili redirect page.

I'm just not sure we can draw conclusions on primary topic (and by extension common name) based on the pageviews data alone, especially when Google search results indicate more hits for Kiswahili than Swahili (I know, not authoritative but certainly indicative of recognizability). Thuralt (talk) 06:33, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

I take your point. Redirects and alternative names aren't just for searching though, they're also link targets; there are currently 4,022 mainspace links to Swahili language, including 134 via KiswahiliKiswahili. Among those:

1. 127 links take the form [[Kiswahili]]
2. 107 take the form [[Swahili language|Kiswahili]]
3. 158 take the form [[Swahili language]]
4. 5 take the form [[Kiswahili|Swahili]]
5. 2,398 take the form [[Swahili language|Swahili]]

My interpretation of this is that a total of 234 links (a and b) use Kiswahili as the common name, while a total of 2,561 (c, d and e) use Swahili as the common name; this would suggest that, in wikilinks at least, Swahili appears to be used more than 10 times as frequently as Kiswahili as the common name for the language.

Re Google search: as you noted, there are issues (laid out at WP:GOOGLE, for instance here) with relying on numbers of search results. It's also worth considering Google Trends; a comparison of search terms shows that searches for Swahili are significantly more frequent than those for Kiswahili, and a topic comparison shows that searches for Swahili make up the majority of searches for the language overall. Pineapple Storage (talk) 16:58, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

I don't think the link counts provide much valuable insight on primary topic or common name really because Kiswahili, as a redirect, exists as technical URI not as an informational resource. Because Swahili language is a WP article, SEO correctly captures the page as having informational value to users and gives the page more importance (over the DAB/redirect) increasing its backlinks and so on, perpetuating a virtuous circle. The link counts you've referenced are simply a reflection of this, not quite what I would consider a conclusive measure of the recognizability of Swahili over Kiswahili.

The Google trends data you've shared is far more compelling (don't know how I forgot to look at this). My take? The frequency of Swahili in search trends could be the result of historical search patterns rather than a reflection of what is truly "more common". The search volume might simply reflect the impact of past usage, people are more likely to search for terms that have already been "searched", rather than any preference for the term Swahili over Kiswahili. Also, Wikipedia articles themselves can often influence traffic and search trends resulting in circular traffic.

But thanks for that search trends data. I'll think on it some more. Thuralt (talk) 09:56, 21 September 2025 (UTC)

• Comment: Neutral on Swahili language vs Kiswahili, but oppose the alternative proposal suggested of a move to plain Swahili. Naturally disambiguating ambiguous language names is literally the primary example given in the WP:TITLE policy for where natural disambiguation should be used. Therefore, the form <NAME> language is very widely used to title articles of languages, and titling the article as Swahili language rather than Swahili is consistent with that. Tomiĉo (talk) 09:05, 18 September 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose original proposal; neutral on "Swahili language" vs. "Swahili". Among English speakers, the language is undoubtedly referred to most commonly as simply "Swahili", and the bigrams/trigrams that Pineapple Storage showed above make a clear case for it being the WP:COMMONNAME. The original comparison of "Kiswahili" vs. "Swahili language" isn't really useful because languages aren't typically described as "X language" unless that's absolutely necessary for disambiguation. As for the WP:CONSISTENT argument, I find that sufficiently recognizable COMMONNAMEs generally override CONSISTENT (we use William the Conqueror, not William I of England), and I feel that Swahili is widely known enough to meet that standard. ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 18:10, 18 September 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose per WP:COMMONNAME. Oppose alternative proposal per WP:CONSISTENT.

• Among the 100 most popular agglutinative languages selected based on page views, only 7 have a title format different from "X language". None of them correspond to an ethnic group.
• For the 24 polysynthetic languages, only Nahuatl has a format different from "X language," and it doesn't correspond to an ethnic group.
• Among the 40 fusional languages, 15 have a different format. Two of these are disambiguated to pages that contain an ethnic group, namely "Latin/Latin (disambiguation)/Latins" and "Arabic/Arab (disambiguation)/Arab." In these cases, the name of the people and the name of the language are slightly different, which is not the case for Swahili.
• Among the 28 analytic languages, 8 have a different format. None of them correspond to an ethnic group.

In conclusion, there is no example of a reasonably popular page which has language as a scope and is titled "X" where X also denotes people. Kelob2678 (talk) 18:54, 18 September 2025 (UTC)

• Move to Swahili and move the DAB back to Swahili (disambiguation). If I were to ask two friends What were you discussing? having heard them talking to each other as I approached but being unsure of their topic and one of them replied Swahili, I would understand that to mean the language, without any ambiguity. This thought experiment could perhaps be formalised as another possible indicator of primary topic... would anyone else be interested in working with me on this? Andrewa (talk) 01:56, 19 September 2025 (UTC)
  • @Andrewa: Wouldn't that also be true of "English"? The single word, no article, standing on its own, generally refers to the language. But it is also an adjective. And if the response you got was "The Swahili" or "The Engilsh", that would be different, too, no? Srnec (talk) 16:56, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

    As this is English Wikipedia, English is not necessarily a model for article namespace pages on other languages. But yes, I think that English language is the primary topic of English in English, and I'd support a move reflecting that. I think that the lead of the current DAB at English is just plain false. It states

    English usually refers to:

    English language

    English people

    English may also refer to:...

    No, English as a noun but without the definite article usually refers to the language.

    That is, I think that the thought experiment that I proposed above for Swahili leads to exactly the same conclusion with respect to English. Our liking for consistency does not mean we should follow a bad example, rather we should correct it. Andrewa (talk) 10:02, 21 September 2025 (UTC)

• Move to Swahili. Clear common name and primary topic. Move Swahili to Swahili (disambiguation). Kiswahili is most certainly not the common name of the language in English-language sources. -- Necrothesp (talk) 15:45, 22 September 2025 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Audio pronunciation of Kiswahili

The current audio used for the pronunciation of Kiswahili uses text-to-speech. I think it would be better if this was replaced with audio from an actual human if possible. Penguin112358 (talk) 17:15, 21 May 2026 (UTC)