Swahili Has 11** Genders**

Thanks to my patrons!!

Written and created by me
Art by kvd102
Thanks to Letsko from Discord for checking my Swahili.
Music by me.

#linguistics #swahili #kiswahili

[Thatdoginme_m]

Kiswahili speaker from Kenya here. This was really insightful. An interesting thing I'd like to add is that in regular speech, a lot of Kenyans straight up ignore proper case use. For example, someone might say "Kiatu yangu"(My shoe) instead of the grammatically accurate "Kiatu changu" since "Kiatu" is in the "Ki-Vi" class.Proper case use is mostly required in formal situations. Btw way the words used to show case are called "ngeli". I'd also be interested to see a video on Kiswahili verb conjugation and how a single verb can contain so much information. eg "He will run" translates to "atakimbia" . Your Kiswahili pronounciation is good by the way. Just try to avoid dipthongs and elongated vowels.

[LingoLizard]

Swahili has 15 genders, and every time someone complains we add 5 more.

[somekek]

As I live in Rwanda and speak Kinyarwanda, I can say that although there are around 16 Genders, they way they are structurally integrated into words makes them often easier to memorize. You can never say Umuntu (man) without the "umu" and if you learn a word, you don't just forget half of it usually.

Also its really crazy how close bantu languages are with these classes, my Kinyarwanda knowledge basically just confirms everything in this video, even though I never learned Kiswahili.

[horsfred]

Honestly genuinely quite shocked that he pronounced Xhosa with a "k" at 2:38. As soon as he showed the map of the wider Bantu family I thought to myself "aaah, he's gonna flex on us with his perfect pronunciation of the aspirated lateral click". Threw me that he didn't!

[modmaker]

Polish has 5 noun classes based on this video

Singular;
1: Masculine
2: Neuter
3: Feminine
Plural;
4: Virile (Masculine)
5: Non-Virile (Feminine & Neuter Combined)

[frankharvey]

As a sympathetic language learner, I legit laughed out loud when you started going over the complex relationships between some of the noun classes. All of a sudden, Spanish’s 2 genders or German’s 3 - or Spanish’s 4 noun classes or German’s 4 - don’t seem all that tough

[louisparry-mills]

it does frustrate me endlessly that we call them genders for non IE languages. just call them noun classes, so much more informative

[lukerheeder]

Love this video! I am a South African and have always loved languages. I speak about 4/5 languages at a conversational level (among them English and Afrikaans which have no grammatical gender) and learnt IsiZulu and IsiXhosa (each with 15 noun classes) at School. I found it incredible how logically and beautifully the languages flow because of all the noun agreement and found it quite funny/ignorant when people complained about the “impossible task” of learning a language like French with only 2 genders.

Don’t really know where I was going with this comment but hey … Bantu languages are cool.

[kui.kariuki]

I'm a native Bantu speaker (I speak Gikuyu and Swahili), but even I learnt some things from this vid that I just kinda knew intuitively. The external perspective brings a new meaning to what I know.

I'm team 'noun classes' for this concept, since for the layman, the phrase 'gender' denotes a property of animals and humans. In Bantu languages, all animals belong to the same noun class, regardless of their gender. The phrase 'He went to Nairobi' would translate to 'Alienda Nairobi' in Swahili losing all information on the subject's gender. If the same phrase was translated to another gender-ed European language, the information would be retained. I would call Bantu languages genderless for this reason. And English would be a gendered language without noun classes.

I'm not a linguist though, so there might be something I'm missing about what 'gender' means in this context.

[swift]

Okay, so I'm a Kenyan Swahili speaker. Now, usually in schools here in Kenya we're taught these classes according to their verb concords and not the nouns themselves. Like the first and second class "M/WA", would be considered "A/WA". This is the noun class of living things, to be precise, animals. So it wouldn't be "Simba ile ilikula nyama" ( The lion ate meat), it would be "Simba yule alikula nyama" and also the plural would be "Simba wale walikula nyama" in standard Swahili.

This totally simplifies a lot of work. Here are the rest of the classes;
Class 3&4 > "U-I" ; Refer to various types of trees and typically most words that start with 'M' but are not animals

Class 5&6 > "LI-YA" ; Refer to big things and various types of fruit( Most of these words don't start with "ji" and are just their own morphemes e.g or neno(word)-maneno(words)). The ones that do start with the prefix "ji" are usually nouns in their big forms. Usually this is done by just adding the "ji" prefix but nouns that start with nasals are either replaced by it or the nasal is just dropped completely with no addition of a prefix. This is seen in words like "Mji" (town) and the big forms would be "Jiji" (City) as seen in the video.

Class 7&8 > "KI-VI" or "CH-VY" ; Refer to tools, abstract concepts and small things(which class 13 was comprised of). These nouns (small things) are made by taking the big forms of the noun then just attaching the prefix "ki".

Class 9&10 > "I-ZI" ; Refer to nouns that don't take any plural at all. Most of these words start with "n". This also includes languages, which usually start with "Ki" but don't take the plural form "Vi". It also includes loanwords from languages like English.

Class 11&12 > "U-ZI" ; In my knowledge, typically nouns that start with "u" but are not abstract nouns as they have a class of their own. Usually if the noun has 3 or less syllables "ny" is added as a prefix as in " Ufa(crack) - nyufa(cracks) and if it has more, the "u" is dropped as in "ukuta(wall) - kuta(walls). Some of them might also start with /w/ as in "wakati(time)" and when following the rules it becomes "nyakati(times) in plural.

Class 14 > "U-U" ; Refer to abstract nouns mainly and so don't really have there own plural. There is also the "U-YA" as stated in the video which is kind of hard to explain as there are a few words in it and very few similarities among them. Look at and "ugonjwa(disease)- magonjwa(diseases). It all comes down to just knowing what words belong to it.
There is also a class for uncountable nouns that is "YA-YA". This class is comprised of only liquids as far as I know. But some liquids are considered not be in a different class like tea (chai) which is considered to be in the "I-I" class which i believe only has things like sugar( sukari) and salt (chumvi) as the only nouns in it other than tea.

Class 15 > "KU-KU" ; Only for infinitives like to run, "kukimbia", or to read, "kusoma". This is not to be confused with the locative class "KU" which in an informal context where class isn't considered may commonly be confused with. This is because the locative class is used a lot more than the infinitives one. So the listener is more used to hearing the locative and will consider the it first before noticing the infinitives.

Class 16, 17&18 > "PA-KU-MU" ; This is the locative class that only has "mahali" or "pahali" as the only nouns.
The "PA" is used for specific places or when both the listener and speaker know the place being talked about.
The "KU" is used for generalised places. That's why you may find prepositions like "kwenye" for "on" originating from this class. But sometimes the meaning of those prepositions changes depending on context.
And the last one "MU" is used for internal places. Like when referring to places within something. Nouns here are derived by adding the suffix "-ni", not to be confused for the ones used in verbs to indicate plurality when talking to people, to the end of another noun. That noun now refers to the internal place of it. As in "shule" for school then "shuleni" for inside the school as a place.

All the noun classes I've mentioned refer to the concords used in Swahili or more specifically the ones used in verbs to indicate subject. Examples:
Mti ulikatwa- The tree was cut
Miti ilikatwa- Trees were cut And so

[crosserror]

Polish linguists consider Polish to have 5 noun classes: masculine-personal, masculine-animate, masculine-inanimate, feminine, neuter.
I saw *this* X and *these* Xs.
- masculine-personal: Widziałem *tego* chłopca i *tych* chłopców (boy)
- masculine-animate: Widziałem *tego* psa i *te* psy (dog)
- masculine-inanimate: Widziałem *ten* nóż i *te* noże (knife)
- feminine: Widziałem *tę* dziewczynkę i *te* dziewczynki (girl)
- neuter: Widziałem *to* dziecko i *te* dzieci (child)
It gets confusing considering that Polish has 7 cases and in some cases the difference between masculine noun classes might not be immediately visible.

[misteryA]

My favorite part of Kiswahili is all the arabic loan words. The Swahili traders were very prolific and often did business with lots of Arabic speakers, so they took the language back with them. As a Hebrew learner, I can find the semitic influence in Safari and Kitabu. It makes me feel like that meme of that guy pointing at the screen

[zelimys]

Polish language is interesting in this regard. It has 3 genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) like many Indo-European languages. However, masculine nouns (and also masculine adjectives and pronouns) have animacy distinction. Inanimate nouns have accusative forms identical to nominative while animate nouns have accusative forms identical to genitive (however animate nouns behave like inanimate in plural). There are also personal animate nouns which have their own distinct ending for nominative plural and have accusative forms identical to genitive also in plural.

[oremooremo]

We call the noun classes, Ngeli in Swahili

[cassiebethgriffith]

Grammatical gender with only two gendered languages has always driven me up the wall, but as a Swahili speaker I love all the noun classes. It’s because grammatical gender doesn’t communicate anything useful, imo, while each noun class in Swahili commmunicates something. a female table? That’s nothing. Whereas in Swahili, each class has its general meaning. Ki-vi? That’s books, spoons, languages, stuff used around the house. M-wa? Easy, that’s for people (and animals to a lesser extent). Animate living things. M-mi is landscapes. Shops, trees, bridges, rivers. By looking at the prefix you can get a sense of what the object is a large portion of the time. A male orange means nothing.

[Daigotsumax]

I like your videos but always wish they were longer! For example it would have been nice to see a couple of examples of what type of words fit into each class here

[Toriish_Pfo]

- What is your gender?
- I'm a mechanic.

[bruno_semi]

You made me really excited with that locative stuff!

[ahtamelna]

The moment I knew why Simba in The Lion King was named like that. 😲😲😲😲😲😲😲😲

[datcatsavedme]

I’ve been learning Swahili for one month so thank you for this video! I really enjoyed it!