alfabeti ya Kiswahili
The Swahili alphabet has 24 letters: 5 vowels and 19 consonants, with ch counted as one letter and no q or x. Spelling is regular, every letter is pronounced, and stress falls on the second-to-last syllable.
Tap a letter to hear it; the small ▶ plays the example word. Practice mode hides names and sounds until you tap a card.
These pairs each spell one sound. They are not counted as separate letters.
Each letter has one sound and every letter is pronounced, including final vowels and doubled vowels: saa (hour, clock) is sa-a, with two a’s. The five vowels are pure and short, never glided as in English.
Stress almost always falls on the next-to-last syllable: ki-TA-bu (book), a-SA-li (honey), and it moves when the word gets longer: vi-ta-BU-ni (in the books).
Q and x are not used, and c appears only as part of ch. Foreign words are respelled: teksi (taxi), kompyuta (computer).
The apostrophe matters. Ng' is the ng of “singer” with no g sound: ng'ombe (cow). Ng without it is ng + g, as in “finger”: ngoma (drum).
M and n often begin a word before another consonant, where they may form a syllable of their own: mtu (person) is m-tu, and mb, nd, nj, nz are said together: ndizi (banana), mbwa (dog).
Letters are commonly named by their sound: vowels as themselves, consonants with e (be, che, de). English letter names are also widely used.
Audio is synthetic speech generated with Google Cloud Text-to-Speech (Chirp 3: HD voices). Letter inventory checked against Unicode CLDR.