Kiswahili, known in English as Swahili, is a Bantu language that grew up along the East African coast, absorbing a large stock of Arabic vocabulary through centuries of Indian Ocean trade; even its name comes from the Arabic word for coasts. It is official in Tanzania and Kenya, widely used in Uganda and the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, and serves as a working language of the African Union and the East African Community. Native speakers number in the tens of millions, and total users including second-language speakers are commonly estimated at well over 100 million, making it by many counts the most widely spoken indigenous language in Africa. Standard Swahili is based on Kiunguja, the dialect of Zanzibar. Once written in Arabic script, it now uses the Latin alphabet.
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