Swahili

Swahili is the great connecting language of East Africa. Around twenty million people grow up speaking it and well over a hundred million more use it every day to trade, study, worship and argue about football across Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and beyond. It grew up on the coast, so its vocabulary carries centuries of Arabic, Persian, Portuguese and English contact, and it is the language of taarab music, bongo flava and a fast-growing film and podcast scene.

For English speakers it is one of the friendliest languages on the planet to start. It is written in the Latin alphabet exactly as it sounds, it has no tones, and the stress almost always falls on the second-to-last syllable. The famous challenge is that a verb is built from small pieces, who, when and what, glued together, so ninakupenda is a whole sentence: I love you. Once that clicks, you can build hundreds of sentences from a few dozen roots.