A few facts about the Giriama language.
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| Map of Kenya showing the location of Giryama speakers From The Verbal Morphology of Kigiryama - see Resources |
It is a Bantu language, related to Swahili, with perhaps 60-70% of Giriama words coming from the same roots. (For comparison, the same source puts English as sharing 60% of its vocabulary with German. French and Spanish share 70%, Spanish and Italian share 80%, and Spanish and Portuguese share 90%.)
You will also see the language name written as Giryama or Kigiriama. 'Ki' is a prefix (more on these in future) which in this case is used for languages. So Kigiriama means 'language of the Giriama', just as 'Kiswahili' means 'Swahili language'. You don't need to use the 'ki' when talking about the language in English - it's nothing to do with respect, it's just a grammatical thing, which is meaningless in English.
Its writing system is based on the Latin alphabet, just like English and other European writing systems, and most other Bantu writing systems. However, it does not seem to be very widely used. As far as I can tell from abroad, there are very few publications in Giriama. Most (?) higher education is in Swahili or English; if you are well enough educated to want newspapers, novels and textbooks, you will be able to read the existing Swahili ones, so there appears to be little demand for Kigiriama publications at present.
See Resources for what I have been able to get hold of so far.
