Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 4.djvu/396

 816 SOFIH AND EAST AFRICA. Persian, Portuguese, and especially Arabic elements. Notably in Zanzibar it has been extensively Arabised, and here all abstract terms are of Semitic origin. Nevertheless the ]iantu substratum has been preserved, and the grammatical structure has remained purely African. From the seaports, centres of commercial life for the wholo of East Africa, Ki-Swaheli has been disseminated throughout the regions of the interior, and like the Bunda language of Angola and neighbour- ing lands, like the Se-Suto of the Basuto people between the Drakcnberg and the Zunjbese, it has become a general medium of intercourse which in some places is already supplanting the local dialects altogether. Although spoken as their mother-tongue by probably not more than a million persons, Ki-Swaheli seems entitled to rank as " one of the twelve most important languages of the world with reference to the vast area over which it is a limjua franca, its position as a leading 1 mguage amidst a host of uncultivated congeners, and its power to assimilate alien elements, especially the Arabic, which has done for it what it has already done for the Turkish, Persian, Urdu, Hausa, and Malay" (Gust). Cameron tells us that during his journey from east to west across the continent, he met in every tribe of the interior one or more persons conversant with this language of the east coast. It was by comparing a number of Ki-Swaheli words with the corresponding terms in the AVest African and Kafrarian dialects that so early as 1808 Lichtenstein was ahle to advance the hypothesis of the fundamental unity of the Bantu peoples from Algoa Bay to Mombaz on the east and the Gaboon on the west coast. This hy[X)thcsis has since been amply confirmed, so far at least as regards the unity of the linguistic family spread over this vast area of many millions of square miles. Ki-Swaheli possesses a relatively copious literature. It comprises, like so muny other Negro dialects, translations of the Bible and of various religious treatises, as well as collections of proverbs, legends, poems, in the publication of which the natives themselves, as well as the missionaries, take an active part. The Arabic alphabet, till recently almost exclusively employed, has now been generally replaced by the Roman characters, which are much more suitable for expressing the sounds of all Bantu languages. But authors have not yet come to an under- standing as to the best dialect to bo definitively adopted as the common literary standard. The preference, however, will most probably be ultimately given to the Unguya, that is, the form current in the island of Zanzibar. Topography. The gradual assimilation of the inland populations to those of the seaboard in all social respects is being steadily effected, not by military expeditions, but by the development of trade and peaceful intercourse. Various centres of population, most of which, however, contain scarcely more than two or three hundred huts, follow successively along the commercial highways leading from the maritime porta to those that have already sprung up on the shores of the great lakes. But many favourably situated harbours are still almost entirely cut off from all communi- cation with the interior by incessant intertribal feuds and slave-hunting expeditions,