“The big bottle”, “The small bananas”: Making adjectives

Shortcut: You make the first letter of the adjective the same as the first letter of the word, except I/Zi-class or Li (singular of Li-Ya).

After identifying what class the noun belongs to, you can apply an adjective.

In Swahili, nearly all adjectives come after the noun.

For example, -zuri, which means “good” or “beautiful”, becomes mtu mzuri (good person) or watu wazuri (good people).

For each class, there’s a different prefix for adjectives.

• For most common classes, the prefix of the noun is also the prefix for adjectives. E.g. in the example above, the prefixes ‘m’ and ‘wa’ are the same for the noun and adjective.
• For all animate nouns (people and animals), use m/wa prefixes.

These are the adjective prefixes you’re likely to encounter.