The Swahili language
and how it is written

Where Swahili ranks

Swahili is the 19th most-spoken language in the world by total speakers ^[1,2]. Here it is among its neighbours in the ranking, on one scale.

“How are you?” in Swahili

The design of Latin alphabet

An alphabet: separate letters for consonants and vowels, written left to right. The Romans took it from a Greek alphabet by way of the Etruscans^[6], and it is now the most widely used script in the world^[7]. Most languages that use it add marks or extra letters for their own sounds^[8].

Alphabet. One letter for each consonant and vowel.

Kind

Alphabet

Direction

Left to right

Took shape

By the 7th century BCE in central Italy

Line of descent

Egyptian hieroglyphs → Proto-Sinaitic → Phoenician → Greek → Etruscan → Latin

Traditional surface

Parchment and vellum

Own digits

No — uses the Western 0–9

Also writes

English Englishespañol Spanishfrançais Frenchportuguês PortugueseBahasa Indonesia IndonesianDeutsch GermanNaijá Nigerian PidginTiếng Việt VietnameseHausa HausaTürkçe TurkishTagalog Tagalog (Filipino)ꦧꦱꦗꦮ Javaneseitaliano ItalianYorùbá Yoruba

• Two alphabets in one

  Capitals come from the square capitals the Romans carved in stone^[9]; small letters come from Carolingian minuscule, a rounded book hand standardised in Charlemagne's empire in the late 8th century^[10]. Writing with both is called case, and software has to know which pairs belong together^[8].

• Built to be extended

  Rather than inventing new letters, most languages bolt marks onto old ones: é, ñ, ç, ş, ọ. Unicode encodes many as single letters and also as a base letter plus a combining mark, so the same word can be stored two ways^[8].

• Gothic or roman

  Through the Middle Ages much of Europe wrote and printed in blackletter. German kept its Fraktur style for everyday print far longer than its neighbours, until the 20th century^[11].

• Ajami: Arabic letters for an African language

  Swahili poets adapted the Arabic script to Bantu sounds for centuries before Latin letters arrived^[3,4].

Swahili is also written in Arabic script.

Explore the letters

Swahili's relatives among the 38

Swahili belongs to the Niger–Congo family (Bantu). These are the other languages with 50 million or more speakers in the same family; the closest — in the same branch — come first.

• YorùbáYorubaYoruboid · 53M

Swahili across the hub

The main page compares all 38 languages. Each link opens it on Swahili.

• Preview it in the explorer →with all 38 side by side
• Hear it in the voice tour →“How are you?” in every language, spoken in turn
• Trace its script's family tree →from the first alphabets and Chinese oracle bones
• Compare its digits →ten ways to write 0–9
• See its share of speakers →an interactive breakdown by script, family and region

Sources

1. Ethnologue — What are the top 200 most spoken languages? (2026)
2. Wikipedia — List of languages by total number of speakers (Ethnologue 2026 figures, retrieved October 2026)
3. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Swahili language
4. Wikipedia — Utendi wa Tambuka (1728)
5. UNESCO — World Kiswahili Language Day
6. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Alphabet (writing)
7. Omniglot — Latin alphabet
8. The Unicode Standard 17.0, chapter 7: Europe-I (Latin, Greek, Cyrillic)
9. Omniglot — Classical Latin alphabet
10. Omniglot — Carolingian minuscule
11. Omniglot — Fraktur
12. Omniglot — Phoenician alphabet
13. The Unicode Standard 17.0, chapter 9: Middle East-I (Arabic)
14. Omniglot — Nabataean alphabet
15. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Alphabet: the Arabic alphabet
16. Omniglot — Arabic alphabet
17. Asian Art Museum, San Francisco — The history of Islamic calligraphy
18. Omniglot — Useful phrases in Swahili

Checked October 25, 2026. Speaker numbers are Ethnologue's 2026 estimates, which count each language separately (Arabic and Chinese varieties are listed one by one). Maps shade whole countries, not regions within them. Found an error? Tell us.