Bajuni is usually classed as a northern dialect of Swahili, a Bantu language, spoken by the Bajuni people of the East African coast. Its traditional territory runs along the shoreline and islands between Kismayo in southern Somalia and the Lamu archipelago in northern Kenya. Speaker numbers are small, plausibly in the low tens of thousands, and the variety differs enough from standard Swahili in sound and vocabulary that other Swahili speakers notice it straight away. The Bajuni have historically lived from fishing and coastal trade, and their speech preserves older Swahili features alongside borrowings from Somali and Arabic. The civil war in Somalia displaced many Bajuni families from the islands, and communities now live scattered through Kenya and further abroad, which makes the language increasingly vulnerable.
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