Somalia to Teach Swahili in Schools to Strengthen Ties with East Africa 

Somalia’s President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud this week announced plans to introduce Swahili, the lingua franca of East Africa, into the national curriculum in an attempt to enhance the country’s integration into the region, the BBC reported. 

During an East African Community (EAC) summit, Mohamud said Swahili would be taught along with Somalia’s official languages, Somali and Arabic.  

In Somalia, the national primary school curriculum is taught in Somali, while English is the language of instruction for most subjects at secondary school. Arabic is the only other mandatory second language taught currently – it was adopted after Somalia joined the Arab League in 1974, Al Jazeera wrote. 

At the summit, Education Minister Farah Sheikh Abdulkadir said they hope that Swahili will become a language of communication, trade, and learning – possibly even replacing English at the next conference.  

This move represents Somalia’s attempt to deepen integration with the eight-member regional bloc, where Swahili is an official language. The country joined the EAC bloc last year with the goal of spurring economic growth after three decades of war. The organization promotes trade and allows freedom of movement across member states, which stretches from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Kenya. 

Swahili dialects are already in use along Somalia’s southern coast, and Swahili has become more widely used around the country in recent years, an effect of the 1991 civil war, when hundreds of thousands of people who crossed the border into Kenya to seek refuge learned the language. With the situation in Somalia becoming somewhat more stable in recent years, some of these fluent Swahili-speaking people have returned.  

The presence of African Union troops has also contributed to the spread of Swahili, as many of these soldiers, deployed since 2007, are from East African nations and Swahili is often their shared language. 

Swahili, spoken by more than 200 million people, is one of the world’s most widely spoken languages.