- ISO 639
sw- Its own name
- Kiswahili
- Script
- Latin
- Direction
- Left to right
Swahili
Swahili (Kiswahili) is spoken by 194.1M people across 6 territories in CLDR, and is official nationally in 3 of them. Tanzania holds 31% of its speakers. One translation covers all of it, which is why localization is planned by language and launched by market.
At a glance
What one translation into Swahili buys, before anyone argues about which market to enter first.
Speakers
194.1M
Tanzania 31% · Congo - Kinshasa 30% · Kenya 20%
First and second language speakers, summed across the 6 territories CLDR records. The bar splits them by territory, largest first.
Online speakers
47.1M
0%100%
24% of speakers, once each territory's speaker count is scaled by its World Bank internet rate. Territories with no internet figure contribute nothing, so this is a floor.
Concentration
31%
0%100%
The largest single territory, Tanzania, holds 31% of speakers. Spread out enough that regional wording and currency will come up.
Territories
6
3 where it is official nationally, 4 where at least one person in five speaks it. The rest are diaspora and minority populations, which CLDR does record.
Reachable GDP
$865B
Combined GDP of every territory where the language appears at all. An upper bound on the market, not a revenue forecast: it counts the whole economy, not the speakers' share of it.
Translation rate
1.00×
1.0×1.6×+
Prices at the mainstream per-word rate used across this site's estimators.
Where Swahili is spoken
Every territory CLDR records, largest speaker count first. Share is of that territory's own population, so the column does not add up to anything.
| Territory | Share of that market | Speakers | Online | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| TanzaniaTZ | 90% | 60.7M | 18.9M | official |
| Congo - KinshasaCD | 50% | 57.7M | 11.4M | major |
| KenyaKE | 66% | 38.4M | 13.4M | official |
| UgandaUG | 75% | 37M | 3.3M | official |
| SomaliaSO | 2% | 260.3K | 72.7K | minority or diaspora |
| MayotteYT | 1% | 2.7K | — | minority or diaspora |
The long tail matters. CLDR does record diaspora populations, so a language usually appears in more territories than its home markets, at small shares. Those rows rarely justify a launch on their own. They are why a language's total reach is larger than any one country page shows. A dash in the online column means the territory has no World Bank internet figure, and it does not mean zero.
What it takes to ship
The work that is not translation: the writing system, the grammar your message format has to survive, and what the words cost.
Writing system
Latin
Lays out left to right, the same as the source. Platform default fonts cover this script.
Plural categories
2
Every counted message needs up to 2 arms, and the translator has to be given all of them.
Rate index
1.00×
Prices at the mainstream per-word rate.