The Swahilization of Kenya`s socio-political culture

Although it has spread mainly as a lingua franca, Kiswahili, Kenya`s national language, is increasingly becoming the language of intercultural communication. Most interestingly, Kiswahili is catching up as the medium of intra-group conversation in many rural up-country areas in Kenya. Not only do most Kenyan women wear lesos and kangas bearing Kiswahili proverbial sayings but the youth form different language communication almost invariably converse and interact through the medium of share or just Kiswahili. This brief paper sets out to speculate on the nature of Swahili lexical diffusion in up-country Kenya. Observation is made of the plorification of common Swahili names in both urban and rural areas far from the Swahili speaking coast. The paper argues that given the ever-growing tendency for non-Swahili speaking Kenyan up-country communities to adopt and use Swahili names represents a forum of intercultural communication. There seems to be a deliberate socio-cultural and political preference for Swahili names not just to denote borrowed Swahili concepts in the up-country communities but to forge a `nationalistic`culture as opposed to a localized and ethnic culture