African languages
Swahili
Swahili is the mother tongue of the Swahili people who inhabit a 1500 km stretch of the East African coast from southern Somalia to northern Mozambique. There are approximately five million first-language speakers and fifty million second-language speakers. Swahili has become a lingua franca for East Africa and surrounding areas. The traditional centre of the language has been Zanzibar, and Swahili is an official language of Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda.