World Swahili Language Day (Swahili: Siku ya Kiswahili ya Umoja wa Mataifa duniani) is observed annually on 7 July.
[1] This began when UNESCO declared 7 July as Swahili Language Day in 2022.
[2][3] On 7 July 1954, Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) leader Julius Kambarage Nyerere, the future first president of Tanzania, adopted the Swahili language as a unifying language for African independence struggles.
Sixteen to twenty percent of the Swahili vocabulary are Arabic loanwords, including the name of the language (سَوَاحِلي, sawāḥilī, a plural adjectival form of an Arabic word meaning 'of the coast').
The loanwords date from contact with Arabic-speaking traders with the Bantu inhabitants of the east coast of Africa from the 1500s to European colonization.