Blogging Siaya: Swahili or Bust (Probably Bust)

The Swahili pile, including headlamp
for your evening blackouts.

The personal project that I'm most excited about here is picking up Swahili. Then, once I've got Swahili down, I say to myself and anyone who will pretend to believe me, I'll take on Luo.* I have so much time here, after all, it makes sense to pay the upfront cost of spending my weekends for the first few months studying the language. But it is hard. 

Kenya is the first place I have been where the locals have insisted on how easy their language(s) is (are) to learn. I remember hearing when I was little that English is a notoriously difficult language for foreigners to learn. I heard it enough that I took it for granted--English in my mind was up there with Japanese. Then, when I went to France, my classmates loudly and modestly insisted that English was easy but it must be such a challenge for someone trying to learn French, with all its conjugations, etc., etc.. And I went to China--it is unsurprising that the Chinese have a (correct) appreciation of the difficulty of their language.

But Kenyans will not let you off so easy. I arrived, pronounced my intention to learn Swahili by the end of a year, and was told, "Ah, it's so simple, you'll know Swahili in six weeks." Six weeks in, this does not make me happy about the minimum of three seconds or so it takes me to locate and conjugate or make agreement of each one of the maybe 150 words I know. 

I actually find it particularly difficult. Probably that is above all beginning from nothing, but it certainly feels like Swahili is just hard. The most challenging thing for me are the long strings of words that have to be modified in relationship to each other. French has conjugations and agreements, but they're just pairs of words: adjectives match their nouns and verbs match their subjects. In Swahili you get a noun whose demonstrative as well as its adjective must match, at the same time that you need the right subject prefix (basically a conjugation). And on top of that a lot of grammatical features (like plural vs. singular) that any of my previous languages would tack on to the end of words are prefixes or even infixes in the middle of words. I have no head for it yet.

Useful example sentences

I have to acknowledge that there's a real possibility that I'm trying too hard. Not in terms of how much effort I've put in--God knows I could and should put in many more hours--but in terms of taking the grammar seriously as an organizing principle for my learning. I am working through a terrific textbook that lays things out quite clearly and in manageable but thorough chunks, giving extensive drill-like exercises to do for each new structure. Yet, when I had my first Swahili lesson with one of our enumerators this week, I realized that people don't seem to have the same kind of ideas about "correct" Swahili that I (for instance) have about English, or that Changchun denizens (for another instance) have about Chinese. J, my teacher, was giving some demonstration sentences, and I couldn't figure out how he was getting the demonstratives and the subject prefixes he was using for those particular nouns. I tried to say it the way I had learned or remembered learning from my textbook, and he said, "Yes, if you say it that way, people will understand."

But I wanted correct Swahili, of course, and I tried to figure out if his usage was a regionalism or they way the language had shifted over the last couple decades. When I pressed him on it, he opened up the textbook he had brought, and somewhat sheepishly said, "You know, when I was learning this, the curriculum was very confused because they were changing the names of all the noun classes."
It left me with the impression that correct Swahili--by any standard--is not quite a national obsession.

My hypothesis is that that's because it's a lingua franca but not a first language (at least not out here in Luoland). On top of that, it's one of two linguae francae (?), where English is the language of literature and status. Sandwiched between local languages and English, Swahili seems to be spoken with a very pragmatic bent.

---

* Luo is a Nilotic language, while Swahili is Bantu, with a heavy dose of Arabic. Neither is too helpful for the other, although Luo has plenty in common with other languages spoken, for instance, in Kalenjin land.