THE KISAWAHILI. 



441 



dialects. Almost every people, at the distance of 

 30 to 50 miles, has its peculiar speech, and in these 

 regions it would not he difficult to collect ' Speci- 

 mens of a hundred African Languages.' The older 

 travellers remarked that the Tower of Bahel 

 must have been near the Gulf of Guinea ; they 

 would have found the same throughout the in- 

 terior and Eastern Coast. 



My experience 1 of the tongues spoken to the 

 west of the Zanzibar coast proper is that their 

 amount of difference greatly varies : some average 

 that of the English counties, others of the 

 three great Neo-Latin languages, whilst in some 

 the degree amounts to that between English, Ger- 

 man, and Dutch. And generally, I may remark, 

 the East-West extremities of the lingual area are 

 more closely connected than the North- South : 

 the language of Angola, for instance, is more like 

 Kisawahili than the Sichuana. I am at pain to 

 understand why Dr Krapf should have named 

 this linguistic family, Orphno- (dark -brown) 

 Hamitic, Orphno-Cushite, Nilo-Hamitic, and Ni- 

 lotic, 2 when it is far more intimately connected 



1 When travelling in East Africa I took as a base the 

 vocabulary of Catherine of Kussia, and filled it up with five 

 dialects, viz., those of the Sawahil, Uzaramo, Khutu, Usagara, 

 and Unyamwezi. 



* In these days, however, we cannot say, with the Opener 



