Another language, Swahili, gets added to the popular social networking website Facebook. Swahili is the most widely spoken Bantu languages, the official language of Kenya and Tanzania and widely used in East and Central Africa.
Over past 5 years, Facebook has vastly spread in these African areas, where most Swahili-speakers live. With the launch of this new Swahili version by a group of Swahili scholars, Facebook will be targeting 110 million speakers of the language.
Next on the list is Facebook’s Hausa version in West Africa and Zulu for Southern Africa. Hausa belongs to the Chadic family of Afroasiatic languages. Facebook already exists in some 50 language versions.
Symon Wanda, one of the project’s initiators said that the launch of the Swahili version was to help safeguard the future of the language, giving people easy access to use the Swahili over English on Facebook. Apparently, over 60% of Facebook users in East Africa are already using the Swahili version.
(Source: Africa News)