A trading language born on the coast became the shared tongue of a hundred million people

Swahili began as a Bantu language enriched over centuries by Arab, Persian, and Indian trade contact along the East African coast. Because it belonged to no single inland ethnic group, it spread as a neutral lingua franca for commerce across the region, and today it's an official language of Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, and the African Union, spoken by well over a hundred million people.

— Derek Nurse and Thomas Spear, The Swahili: Reconstructing the History and Language of an African Society, 800-1500 — University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985
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