Herein, we explore the current finite-state methods that exist for analyzing English grammar and decide whether they can be applied to the Swahili language and Swahili syntactic patterns. Further, we to explore the differences between Swahili grammar and English grammar to see if it is possible to accommodate these finite-state methods to the Swahili language. In the end, the objective is to de...

In spite of increasing prevalence of diabetes among Kenyans and evidence suggesting Kenyans with diabetes maintain poor glycemic control, no one has examined the role of cultural attitudes, beliefs, and practices in their self-management of diabetes. The purpose of this ethnographic study was to describe diabetes self-management among the Swahili of coastal Kenya, and explore factors that affec...

We evaluate the quality of speech transcriptions acquired by crowdsourcing to develop ASR acoustic models (AM) for under-resourced languages. We have developed AMs using reference (REF) transcriptions and transcriptions from crowdsourcing (TRK) for Swahili and Amharic. While the Amharic transcription was much slower than that of Swahili to complete, the speech recognition systems developed usin...

Most studies on spontaneous speech of individuals with agrammatism have focused almost exclusively on monolingual individuals. There is hardly any previous research on bilinguals, especially of structurally different languages; and none on characterization of agrammatism in Swahili. The current study identifies the features of Swahili agrammatic narrative and spontaneous speech, and compares th...

Text-to-speech (TTS) applications have been applied in diverse areas all over the world. Considering the fact that Swahili pronunciation is not complicated, and the language spoken by about 45 – 100 million people as their first or second language,, we considered the feasibility, and developed a Swahili Text-to-Speech (TTS) system. This paper gives an account of the Swahili TTS system developed...

Codeswitching is a very common behavior among Swahili speakers, but of the little computational work done on Swahili, none has focused on codeswitching. This paper addresses two tasks relating to Swahili-English codeswitching: word-level language identification and prediction of codeswitch points. Our two-step model achieves high accuracy at labeling the language of words using a simple feature...

This paper introduces a computational method for testing dictionaries. It discusses the implementation of this method on testing five current dictionaries of Swahili and provides a number of test results. The tested dictionaries are Kamusi ya Kiswahili Sanifu (TUKI), Kamusi ya Maana na Matumizi (OUP), Modern Swahili Modern English Dictionary (MStryck), Kamusi ya Kiswahili Kiingereza (TUKI), and...

In this article, we examine an assumption about the historic Swahili of the eastern African coast: that they were a maritime society from their beginnings in the first millennium C.E. Based on historical and archaeological data, we suggest that, despite their proximity to and use of the sea, the level of maritimity of Swahili society increased greatly over time and was only fully realized in th...