Breaking News! African Union Finally Adopts Swahili As Official Working Language!
African Union finally adopts Swahili as an official working language after much deliberation from East African leaders.
The African Union (AU) has finally adopted Swahili as its official language. Swahili is the lingua franca of East Africa and widely spoken in Comoros, southern Somalia, and other parts of the African Great Lakes region.
This is a significant victory for the continent and translators who work from English to Swahili and vice versa.
African Union finally adopts Swahili as official working language
Following a request from Tanzania’s Vice President, Andrew Wasike Shimanyula, the African Union’s Heads of State approved the move.
According to him, “Kiswahili is already in use in a number of communities, notably the East African Community (EAC) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC), as well as being used as a teaching language in a number of African countries.”
Existing African union official working languages are currently English, Portuguese and French and Arabic.
Immigration, globalization, and a preference for official languages like Arabic, French, and English have taken a toll on African languages during the previous few decades. The hesitant in adoption of Swahili as an African Union official language in the past hasn’t made things better.
The announcement was made in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, during the African Union’s Assembly of Heads of State and Government. A majority of government officials who are part of African Union countries were caught off guard and scrambled to find interpreters.
Swahili’s bid to become a language for all of Africa
Swahili has positioned itself as a lingua franca of other areas in the African Great Lakes region and East and Southern Africa , including some parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Malawi , Mozambique , parts of Somalia , Comoros and Zambia.
More than 100 million people in three African Great Lakes ( Kenya , Uganda , and Tanzania ) countries speak Swahili as a second language, where it is both an official and national language. It is also the first language for many Tanzanians and Kenyans who reside coastal areas.
The Southern African Development Community, also known as SADC, officially adopted Swahili as its fourth official language, effective August, 2019. At the time, English, Portuguese, and French were the other official languages of the SADC.
According to a summit declaration, the leaders adopted Swahili as the fourth SADC official working language in honor of former Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere’s role in the liberation struggle of southern Africa.
South Africa has welcomed the adoption of Swahili as the working language of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and has already begun teaching it in its schools. It is possible that more countries will follow South Africa in teaching the language in classrooms in the near future, given how quickly the language is growing and becoming a household language in many African countries.
Cementing African identity through Swahili
While there are over 2,000 languages spoken throughout Africa, the significance of indigenous African languages in postcolonial modern countries is up for debate. Due to immigration, globalization, and the establishment of official languages like Arabic, French, and English, the place of African languages has deteriorated during the previous few decades. African languages have been de-legitimized in the social, economic, and political sectors because they are seen as a barrier to education.
For a long time, African leaders have attempted to persuade the African Union to finally adopt Swahili as an official language of the continent.
Despite the fact that it has previously been discussed as a substitute to English, French, or Portuguese on the continent, there is now renewed interest in using it as a common language.
Kiswahili, according to many African leaders, is a perfect starting point for preserving integrative multilingualism, which includes indigenous languages. The goal is for African indigenous languages to be widely used at all levels of government, from the local to the continental.
According to the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning, Africa remains the only continent in which the majority of children begin school speaking a foreign language.
Things are going to change for the better, however, as the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has designated July 7 as World Kiswahili Language Day.
African Union finally adopts Swahili as its official language. Swahili is the lingua franca of East Africa. This move is a big success for the African continent and Swahili translators.