 Of course, it's an ideal vehicle to understand people's culture, I mean the way people behave and interact with others, and of course also the history. So the history of a people, cultural history, is very tightly connected to linguistic history. And the case of Swahili is certainly a case in point, so it's both instructive and interesting and fascinating in a way, to look at the history of the language a little bit more detail. The history of Swahili is a fascinating story, spanning some 1200 years from the East African coast to its present use as the language of wider communication in East Africa. And it's a global language. In the next couple of slides, we're going to trace that history through more than 1000 years. The 1200 years of the history of Swahili can be divided into four different parts, from 800 common era to today, Swahili served as a coastal language at the beginning, then was used along the trade routes to the interior of the East African continent, then expanded also under the colonial administration and finally is the language of wider communication in East Africa. Before looking at the history of Swahili proper, it's worthwhile going back a bit further and look at the prehistory of Swahili, if you like, the ancient history. It was said some time ago in the 19th and early 20th century that Africa didn't have history, but that's of course as long as you can get the splendor of history in Africa and of histories in Africa. And one of these histories is the history of the Bantu languages. Swahili is a Bantu language belonging to a large family of some 450 languages. And the origins of this family lie in West Africa in today's Cameroon and can be traced back to about 5000 years ago. From the original location of the Bantu languages slowly, slowly the Bantu languages expanded through a process of movement of speakers through social innovation, economic innovation, patterns of language shift and multilingualism, slowly expanding southwards and eastwards, reaching East African coast some 2000 years ago. We can talk about the history of Swahili proper from about 800 AD, at that stage in early, early form of Swahili was established on the coast and then became the language of the entire coast as the language of a mercantile, seafaring, urban, Muslim society. There was a link with Islam. It was a city-based language. There were trading port cities along the coast, Lamu, Mombasa, Kilwa and trading on daus. Swahili traders used the monsoon winds to trade southwards for about half a year and then northwards again for about half a year and by 1100 AD Swahili was used from southern Somalia down to northern Mozambique and the Kamor islands. It was also a time from then and onwards where Swahili culture and literature blossomed. Here's a famous example of 19th century Swahili poetry and an outstanding example of Swahili and African literature and that is the Al-Inki Shafi, the soul's awakening as it has been translated by Sayyid Abdullabbi Nasir. Like all early Swahili literature, the poem is written in Arabic script sometimes called Ajami and reading this poetry like the Al-Inki Shafi is an art form. Sawa's archive holds rare recordings of the performance of this poem and other classical Swahili poems by the famous Swahili scholar Shai Yahya Ali Omar. So here is the first few stanzas of the Al-Inki Shafi. On the top we see the original classical Swahili which is quite different from modern standard Swahili so the middle part is the standard Swahili version of it provided by Poetry Kenya and then there's an English translation at the bottom and I'm going to play Shai Yahya performing and please this beginning. I have a lot of scholarship on these old Swahili poems because it's still a lot of work being done. It's a very active and fascinating research here. The next stage in the history of Swahili is the eminent trade routes and the colonial administration and the Shaita said also resistance to colonial administration. In the 19th century Swahili traders and Arab traders established trade routes from the post into the interior trading ivory spices and also the slave trade. These trade routes ran from coastal towns like Mombasa, Bagramoli and Kirwa westwards into into the interior reaching Uganda, Western Tanzania, Wanda Barundi as well as the eastern and today's eastern DRC. Along these trade routes Swahili was used and then become established in towns and cities like Tabora, Uttiti or Uttanbashi. Around the same time we also see the appearance of Christian missionaries from Europe and in their way colonial administration but also then resistance to that administration and all these three dynamics are related in many ways to Swahili language. So from the late 19th to the mid 20th century East Africa was governed by different colonial powers English, German, Belgian, Portuguese. Swahili was increasingly used as a language of education and administration and we also see the development of Swahili writing in Roman scripts by Christian missionaries who would use Swahili for Bible translations. However Swahili was also used in resistance to colonial power most notably in the Marji, Marji or Marji the Swahili word for water of 1905 to 1907 where in particular southern Tanzania a number of ethnic groups united to resist German colonial administration and in that movement Swahili was used for cross ethnic communication which was later used as independent language policy to show the pedigree of Swahili as an anti-colonial and cross-community language. A good attestation for the spread of Swahili even in the 19th century comes from a contemporary witness Johanna Barnabas Abdallah who was the author of one of the earliest and histories of the Yao a ethnic group in southern Tanzania Malawi and Mozambique and Abdallah was trained by the university's mission to send university mission to Central Africa and he writes in 1894 when he was in Zanzibar at the Qumgani school the university university mission society had set up there and he says that we are so many boys in this house of different tribes Yao's, Makua's, Bondes and Niasas but we all speak Swahili language so that already showed that Swahili who was used as a language of wider communication across different ethnic groups and linguistics groups in Tanzania and indeed in eastern Africa today Swahili is the language of East Africa used for wider communication in all public domains and widely spoken throughout the region and after independence Swahili became the national and official language in several East African countries in Tanzania, Kenya, later on in Uganda it is widespread in education, media and public discourse and there's a rich tradition of literature and music and popular culture and then in the 21st century we see Swahili becoming a Pan-African entity, the global language reaching beyond both the coastal areas and indeed the East African mainland to wider audiences. Here are some visual impressions of the appeal and use and Swahili on the top we have an advertisement from Tanzania for a mobile phone company and it says Lurayetsu Faharietsu our language our pride and it plays both with the Tanzanian national flag and national colors and the use of Swahili as a symbol of national identity. At the bottom we see the use of sheng an urban youth language starting to be used in Kenya some decades ago and currently very very popular and here we see the shengwa cha pa in an advertisement for cash machine ATM so it says pa-ta-cha pa around the corner we have standard Swahili pa-ta to get then the shengwa for money and then English showing how sheng has been integrated into mainstream language use in Kenya and that's an example of the versatility of Swahili in adopting different forms and plexus. The top image shows bilingual signage as you move to Kenyatta airport in Kenya and the bottom picture shows the renowned Swahili scholar Professor Clara Mumanji who is delivering a keynote address at the International Conference of Chakita and the Chama Chakisweli Chattahifa the National Key Swahili Association of Kenya showing the white academic interest and active research that being conducted on Swahili. This now takes us beyond East Africa and showing the global spirit of Swahili these are some countries where Swahili is taught at university level so it shows that we have Swahili teaching in North America in many places in Europe in China and Japan and Asia in East Africa of course but also in Africa beyond East Africa for example in Ghana and South Africa and of course we teach Swahili at source as well here's a snapshot of our Swahili 1a module and it remains our most popular African language and one of our most popular languages across the school and we have several teaching modules and also a lively research environments in seminars. Stepping back from the details a little bit and looking at the history of the Swahili language it is indeed a remarkable story starting from a language spoken along the coast to becoming certainly the most important language in East Africa and official national language in several countries and indeed a global language Swahili is taught at universities in North America in Europe Asia and several African countries. It's an astounding development over the last 1200 years now we can ask ourselves what's behind that what are the factors accounting for this development and there's a number of features maybe which come to mind. The first one is that Swahili for a very long time has been associated with trade so it was trade Indian Ocean trade along the monsoon winds when Swahili spread across the East African coast along the city states and it was trade which then led to the use in the continent through trade routes up to Uganda, Western Tanzania, the present day DRC. So trade always has been historically a driver of language spread languages associated with trade and business are good languages to speak and the other element maybe is the absence of strong political power. Now the Swahili always have been very important traders very important to commercial people there was important cities but there never was a big Swahili empire which was in competition with other people so adopting Swahili as a language of wider communication didn't mean supporting a big political superstructure which you know in many cases people might have been reluctant to been afraid of apprehensive of you know there's many cases in certain African contexts where that happened where a national language is denied and suspiciously by minority languages because of the associated political power but that was Swahili that wasn't really the case. So the positive influence of trade if you like and then the absence of political threat on the other hand were both very positive factors for this bit of Swahili over the last hundred years and the third element which is important I think is the ability of Swahili to adapt to different cultures and religions political ideas it's in if you like it's an ideological versatility which has served the language very very well over the last hundred years. So historically associated very much with Islam the coast is very Islamic a lot of Swahili literature is influenced by Islam and there's an interesting blend of African and Islamic elements but then Swahili was used for Christian missionaries by Christian missionaries to spread Christianity and has been adopted by many Christian congregations there's lots of Bible translations into Swahili and more recently it's been strongly associated with in Tanzania at least with Udyama the political ideology of after independence associated with President Nirehre sometimes translated as African socialism so that's a very different set of ideas a different set of proponents of these ideas but in any case in all these cases Swahili was very useful and was uncritically if you like adopted as a vehicle to promote these ideas and the final element might be associated with this ideological versatility is the ability of the language and the willingness of the language to adopt loanwords like English which has thrived really on including and appropriating and using lots of lexical resources beyond the the own narrow confines Swahili has loanwords and lexical material from Arabic from Hindi from Gujarati lots of South Asian languages of course from English but also from German from Portuguese and and through that entity from many African languages and through that has managed to enrich its vocabulary and the lexical structure and the expressiveness to an astounding effect and I think all these different elements have contributed to the continuous popularity of Swahili and the the result at the end of the day which we see today as a global language. With this we have concluded our short survey of Swahili history I hope it was enjoyable and I hope we can continue talking about different aspects of Swahili at some future occasion. Shukrani and thank you.