Swahili language research & digital preservation
Kiswahili
كِسْوَهِيْلِ
We build the linguistic infrastructure Kiswahili needs to thrive online — in its Latin form and in Ajami, its historic Arabic-script writing system — for the next billion people who will speak it.
Swahili speakers today
writing systems, one standard
open tools in active development
Kamusi Research Labs is a Tanzanian non-profit building the dictionaries, transliteration engines, spellcheckers and editing tools that let Kiswahili operate as a first-class digital language — not a translated afterthought. We treat Ajami, the Arabic-script tradition Kiswahili was written in for centuries before Latin orthography arrived, as equally first-class: a living script, not an archive piece.
Generations of poetry, correspondence, religious scholarship and trade records along the Swahili Coast were written in Ajami. Digital Kiswahili has almost entirely forgotten this. We're building the fonts, keyboards, transliteration and tooling to bring it back — not as a museum exhibit, but as a script people can write, search and read on the modern web.
Everything we build is released under the @kamusi-org organization — free for researchers, developers and institutions to use, audit and extend.
The transliteration engine
A bidirectional transliteration engine between Latin-script Kiswahili and Swahili Ajami, built on documented historic and modern orthographic conventions. Ajami is the foundation every other Kamusi project builds on.
View project →The Swahili Ajami learning playground
An interactive playground for learning to read and write Swahili Ajami — built for native Kiswahili speakers who read Latin script fluently but never learned the historic Ajami writing system.
View project →The Standard Swahili spellchecker
The most comprehensive Standard Swahili spellchecker, built for enterprise and institutional use — designed to plug into editors, CMSs and publishing pipelines that need reliable Kiswahili proofing at scale.
View project →The bilingual-script document editor
A web-based document editor with native support for Standard Swahili in both scripts — write, edit and format in Latin or Ajami, in the same document, with the same editing experience.
View project →Kamusi Research Labs runs on volunteers, collaborators and sponsors who care about language technology and digital equity. Linguists, engineers, designers, translators and funders are all welcome.
