SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The Diccionario Swahili-Español is a learning tool for Spanish speaking Swahili students and linguists, created with the collaboration of linguists and lexicographers of the prestigious Latin American university that published it (el Colegio de Mexico). It contains a sketch of Swahili grammar, and more than 10,000 carefully selected entries and sub-entries. In addition to describing the language, this dictionary is a cultural text of modern Swahili. It also contains many examples of usage, and notes on dialect variations and special uses of certain words that are culturally or semantically specific to the Swahili language. It also includes neologisms and coinages that are not present in older dictionaries. The selection of entries was based on a lexicostatistical study of the language conducted by the author. The book was described by the African Academy of Sciences as “an important advance in the internationalization of Swahili.” It is the first ever-published dictionary of these two major world languages.