- 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.
Reach summary
What one translation into Swahili covers, across every market that speaks it.
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.
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%
Tanzania, the largest single territory, 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. It counts whole economies, not the speakers' share, so read it as an upper bound.
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 has no total.
| 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 | 1.4% | 2.7K | — | minority or diaspora |
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, but they are why total reach runs higher than any one country page shows. A dash in the online column means no World Bank internet figure, not zero.
What it takes to ship
The work that is not translation.
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 needs all of them.
Rate index
1.00×
Prices at the mainstream per-word rate.