المصطلحات الزوجية السواحلية أصلها اللغوي ودالالتها االجتماعية

Abstract

This paper studies “Swahili marital terms, their origin, linguistic and social connotations.” 

What prompted the researcher to choose this topic was the fact that he noticed the presence of a large number of Swahili terms in the theme related to marital issues and the fact that these marital terms have different origin, linguistic and social connotations. 

   In conducting this study, the researcher used the descriptive, analytical, and inductive method, and relied on primary and secondary sources in collecting information.

This study consists of six sections, which are preceded by preliminaries containing an abstract and an introduction to the research, followed by the first section in which the researcher dealt with a historical overview of the Swahili language. In the second section, the researcher mentioned marital terms of Arabic origin with their linguistic and social connotations. Where by in the third section, he explored the Swahili marital terms of English origin. Again, in the fourth section, the researcher revealed martial terms of Bantu origin, while, in the fifth section, he made an analysis of the collected information and then he unveiled the results of the paper. Finally, in the sixth section, the researcher presented a conclusion, a general summary, recommendations and a list of primary and secondary sources.

Among the most important findings of this study are:

• Many marital terms are originated from the Bantu languages spoken on the East African coast in general and in Zanzibar in particular.
• The availability of few marital terms of English origin, which emerged recently of all studied terms.

The existence of Swahili marital terms, which are used with the same Islamic connotations.