What are the noun classes in Swahili?

Swahili noun classes

• M-wa class.
• M-mi class.
• Ma class.
• Ki-vi class.
• N class.
• U class.
• Ku class.
• Pa locative class.

Is Swahili a proper noun?

An agglutinative language widely spoken in East Africa.

Is Swahili pro drop?

Swahili may be described in several ways depending on the aspect being considered. It is an agglutinative language. It is a pro-drop language. Verbs may be used without explicitly specifying the subject or the object with substantives (nouns or pronouns).

How does Swahili mark subject and object?

Swahili is an agglutinative language, with considerable prefixing and suffixing. The unmarked word order is S-V-O, as shown in example (1)2 below. In (1), the subject (Juma) occurs preverbally and the object (Mariam) occurs postverbally. Furthermore, the object may also be dropped (4).

Is Swahili gendered?

Swahili doesn’t have the same masculine/feminine/(neuter) grammatical gender categories that you see in nouns in languages like Spanish, German, or Russian. Instead, Swahili has nine noun classes into which all nouns are divided, in the same way all nouns have a gender in the other languages listed above.

Is Swahili a SOV language?

Swahili is an SVO language in which the verbal clause has the following order of morphemes in an affirmative indicative sentence: Subject Agreement – Tense/Aspect – (Object Agreement) – Verb Root – (derivational suffixes) – Mood Vowel.

Is Sov a Swahili?

Swahili generally has an SVO word order, though you can actually express a subject, verb, and object into one word.

Is Swahili a language?

Swahili language, also called kiSwahili, or Kiswahili, Bantu language spoken either as a mother tongue or as a fluent second language on the east coast of Africa in an area extending from Lamu Island, Kenya, in the north to the southern border of Tanzania in the south.

Is Swahili hard to learn?

How hard is it to learn? Swahili is said to be the easiest African language for an English speaker to learn. It’s one of the few sub-Saharan African languages that have no lexical tone, just like in English. It’s also much easier to read as you read out Swahili words just the way they are written.

Why is English not gendered?

A system of grammatical gender, whereby every noun was treated as either masculine, feminine, or neuter, existed in Old English, but fell out of use during the Middle English period; therefore, Modern English largely does not have grammatical gender.

What is vocabulary in Swahili?

msamiati. vocabulary. lugha. vocabulary (also: dialect, tongue, language)

What is the order of morphemes in Swahili verb?

How are noun classes used in Swahili language?

There are lots of complicated descriptions of noun classes, so this is a simple introduction to noun classes. Swahili noun classes work a lot like gender in German, French or Spanish. In Spanish, “the house is beautiful” is la casa es hermosa, but “the lake is beautiful” is el lago es hermoso.

When do you use class Accord in Swahili?

Just as gender accord is required in many Indo-European languages (e.g., French, Spanish, German, Russian), the modifiers and verbs associated with a given noun must show class agreement with the noun by using certain prefixes. This results in marked alliteration: Those two good people fell.

What is the plural of Maji in Swahili?

maji — water ( no singular ). For a list of Wiktionary entries for nouns in this class, see Category:Swahili ma class nouns . This class is also known as Class VII (in the singular) and Class VIII (in the plural).

Which is the hardest part of Swahili grammar?

A simple cheat sheet for understanding the hardest part of Swahili Grammar — Swahili noun classes! This is a Swahili noun class “cheat sheet”, a brief summary of one of the hardest parts of Swahili grammar and how to use them in building sentences. We built this for ourselves, so are sharing it in case people learning Swahili find it useful.