Attitudes to Swahili
The role Swahili in unifying the people of Tanzania to work for independence guaranteed it prestige and positive attitudes. The charisma of Nyerere himself carried over to the language he used extensively in his speeches and his political writing. People have often seen the success of Swahili as the national language in Tanzania as due to its ‘neutral’ status – it is not identified with a particular tribe. But its widespread acceptance was also due to the fact developed a strong loyalty towards the language which united them in working towards uhuru (‘freedom’)
The story of the acceptance of Swahili as the national language of Tanzania is therefore an interesting one. Swahili serves as a lingua franca in a country with hundreds of different tribal vernaculars. It provides an economical solution to the problem of which language to use for local administration and primary education. It provides a culturally acceptable symbol of unity. Linguistic diversity can seem problematic to those working for political unification. It is potentially divisive. Swahili has provided a very convenient compromise in Tanzania. But finally it is important to remember that the story of how Swahili became the national language of Tanzania might be told rather differently by a group whose tribal vernacular was a competing lingua franca.
In this section, the steps involved in developing a particular code or variety for use as a national language have been discussed in relation to a large multilingual country, Tanzania, where the competing varieties are distinct languages. Exactly the same processes and steps are relevant in the deliberate development of a particular dialect for use as national language in a monolingual country, as we shall see in the next section in relation to Norway, a country with relatively small and homogeneous population.