Swahili makes history as first African language recognized by Twitter

Screen Shot 2018-05-09 at 5.46.39 PM.pngTwitter has officially recognized Swahili as a language. Well that does not mean that Twitter has yet added Swahili to language settings.

Though the social media platform now recognizes Swahili words and offers translation of the widely spoken and written East African language.

Since last week, Twitter started detecting the language in tweets and subsequently offers a close to perfect translation as with most other foreign languages.

Kenya Ministry of Sports and Heritage joined Twitter users to celebrate the feat. “Kiswahili which is widely used in East Africa, is Kenya’s national language & it unites the people of Kenya,” the tweet said in part.

Swahili, also known as Kiswahili –  the first language of the Swahili people. It is a lingua franca of the African Great Lakes region and other parts of eastern and south-eastern Africa, including Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Mozambique, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC.) 

Estimates of the total number of Swahili speakers vary widely, from 50 million to over 100 million.  Swahili serves as a national language of four nations: Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, and the DRC. Swahili is also one of the working languages of the African Union and officially recognised as a lingua franca of the East African Community.

13537741_10209328713390171_8282725518331626905_nMelanie Nathan
My e-mail commissionermnathan@gmail.com
Support our work at African Human Rights Coalition
Check out my shenanigans on Facebook
Follow me on Twitter – @MelanieNathan1
Check out my Instagram: Commissionermelnathan
Visit my Family Law Mediation site: Private Courts
RESIST TRUMP on FACEBOOK
Ask me to Speak: SPEAKER

 


Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.