al-Siyāsah al-Lughawīyah fī Sharq Ifrīqiyā fī ʻAhd al-Būsaʻīdīyīn - Fārisī, ʻAlī ibn Ḥamad; Ṣubḥī, Aḥmad ibn Nāṣir; Kāsbī, Yūsuf; Muʼtamar al-Istiqāmah al-Duwalī al-Thānī: al-ʻUmānīyūn wa-al-Sawāḥilīyah bayna al-Taʼthīr wa-al-Taʼaththur (2026) (Mumbāsā) (Mumbāsā : Jamʻīyat al-Istiqāmah al-Khayrīyah al-Islāmīyah al-ʻĀlamīyah, 2026)
After the retreat of Portuguese colonialism, Omani rule extended to East Africa from Somalia along the African coasts as far as the island of Zanzibar, and this political and cultural ascendancy over these ports created a unique linguistic reality whose effects remain in place to this day. That new linguistic reality took the form of a local language which in many cases mingled with Arabic to form the Swahili language, and in other cases coexisted alongside it, within a cultural awareness that shaped the scene and a language policy that contributed to forming it — a policy that may have been explicit in a limited range of practices and implicit in many others. Despite the importance of this language policy, explicit and implicit alike, in shaping that linguistic reality, it has not yet received sufficient research attention in recording and describing its dimensions and features. The research aims to describe the linguistic reality in East Africa during Omani rule.
Permanent citation identifier: MHF-MOMBASA2026-028.
Conference theme (in Arabic): المحور الأول: التأثير العُماني في السواحلية.
Text in Arabic; title also romanized (ALA-LC); abstract and keywords in English.
Keywords: Language policy; Būsaʿīdī dynasty; East Africa; Zanzibar; Swahili formation; Colonial history