Swahili is the most widely spoken indigenous language in Africa and an official language of Tanzania and Kenya.
Swahili, also called Kiswahili, belongs to the Bantu branch of the Niger-Congo language family. It developed along the East African coast through contact among Bantu-speaking communities and traders from Arabia, Persia, and India. Its vocabulary includes many loanwords from Arabic, although its underlying grammar is Bantu.
Swahili is also an official language of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and it is one of the working languages of the African Union. It serves as a lingua franca across much of East Africa, so native-speaker counts and total-speaker counts can differ substantially.
Swahili is normally written in the Latin alphabet today. Earlier coastal texts were also written in a modified Arabic script known as Swahili Arabic script.