Abstract:
Many scholars have classified Kiswahili as a member of Niger-Congo family based on the
genealogical classification of Bantu languages. This system determines languages genetic
relatedness by use of lexicostatistics (Schadeber, 1986). For years, this classification system has
guided linguists and anthropologists to understand, analyse, compare and group languages. It
has also aided the understanding of the births and deaths of languages. However, this
classification system tells us little about the structural relatedness of genealogically grouped
languages. This relatedness is only captured by the Morphological system. Although this system
has been in existence since 1800 before the genealogical classification, it has least been used to
classify and describe many languages of the world. Few Kiswahili scholars have classified
Kiswahili morphologically as agglutinative. However, their classification has not put into
consideration other morphological classification types that can be deduced from Kiswahili
morphological structure. The objective of this paper therefore, is to do an in-depth morphological
classification of Kiswahili based on secondary data collected from two Kiswahili prose texts,
namely: “Shamba la Wanyama” (translation of animal farm) and “Siku Njema”.
