General Information

Swahili Forum is an international peer reviewed journal for Swahili Studies published since 1994. Scholars are invited to submit papers on all aspects of Swahili language, culture and society as well as book reviews pertaining to these topics. Writers are also welcome to submit original works such as poems or short stories.Contributions are accepted in Swahili, English, German and French. They undergo peer review and an editorial process. Swahili Forum appears annually in December. It is an open access online journal (http://www.ifeas.uni-mainz.de/SwaFo/).

History
In 1983, Swahili scholars from many different countries started to build up a tighter network and communicate about ongoing research. A first initiative was the establishment of the newsletter Swahili Language and Society: Notes and News (SLS: NN), first issued in 1984, edited by Joan Maw, Lourenco Noronha and (from 1989 onwards) Karl Thomanek, at the Institute for African Language Studies, University of Vienna, Austria. The newsletter informed about researchers, projects, new publications and the teaching of Kiswahili worldwide. Occasionally smaller articles and reviews were also published. For lengthier articles on ongoing research in Swahili linguistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics and literary studies, Marcel van Spaandonck and Jan Blommaert initiated the monograph series Working Papers on Kiswahili (WPK), which was published from 1987 onwards at the Seminar of Swahili and the Language Problems of Developing Nations at the University of Ghent, Belgium. By 1993, both WPK and SLS: NN ceased to appear with a final No.10 of the latter, edited by Jan Blommaert at the International Pragmatics Association, Antwerp, Belgium. Swahili Forum was launched to fill the gap and to provide the international community of Swahilists with a platform for scientific articles in the broad field of Swahili Studies. The journal was inaugurated in 1994 in the form of an annual number of the quarterly Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere (AAP), issued at the Institute for African Studies, University of Cologne, Germany. Special editors of Swahili Forum were Rose Marie Beck, Thomas Geider, Werner Graebner, Ingo Heine (for the 1997 issue) and, since 2000, Lutz Diegner. Swahili Forum greatly profited from the Swahili Colloquium, which Prof. Gudrun Miehe first organized in 1987 at the University of Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and later continued to hold in cooperation with Prof. Said A.M. Khamis at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. After Prof. Miehe’s retirement, Prof. Gabriele Sommer is cooperating with Prof. Khamis in organising the colloquium. Many of its participants subsequently submitted their papers to Swahili Forum, which also increasingly attracted authors from East Africa and beyond. Swahili Forum appeared in nine print issues between 1994 and 2002. With the change of the quarterly AAP to Annual Publication in African Linguistics (APAL), published since 2003 by Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, Cologne, the editors of Swahili Forum had to decide whether Swahili Forum should cease to appear or could find a new home. This was readily found at the Institute for Anthropology and African Studies within the section of African Philology, University of Mainz, Germany. Uta Reuster-Jahn who worked at the institute in Mainz joined the editors. Considering the high printing costs and the growing usage of the World Wide Web the editors decided to begin to issue Swahili Forum as an online publication. In 2003, Swahili Forum 10 was published as the first volume appearing online.
After the death of Thomas Geider in 2010, the journal is currently edited by Rose Marie Beck (University of Leipzig), Claudia Böhme (University of Leipzig), Maud Devos (Royal Africa Museum, Tervuren), Lutz Diegner (Humboldt University Berlin), Uta Reuster-Jahn (University of Hamburg) and Clarissa Vierke (University of Bayreuth).

The "Deutsche Nationalbibliothek" (German National Library) has archived the electronic publication "Swahili Forum", which is permanently available on the archive server of Deutsche Nationalbibliothek: http://www.d-nb.de/ .