Swahili syllabic Alphabet

The syllabic alphabet outlines all the possible combination of consonants and vowels that serve as a basis for all the Swahili words. Therefore, the Swahili syllabic alphabet enumerates all the possible syllables that are used to construct Swahili words. The syllables are considered the smallest unit in Swahili and could consists of a vowel preceded by one to three consonants though there are special syllables made of single consonants or vowels. To derive the Swahili syllabic alphabet, we used the syllabification rules by and the digraphs and trigraphs proposed by Masengo. The syllables include prefixes that serve as Swahili noun class markers or subject prefixes (a, wa, vi, ki, m, mi), tense prefixes (na, li, ta, nge), relative prefixes (o, mo, ko, po, cho, vyo, lo, ye) and object markers (ki, vi, m, wa, mwu, ya, ji, mu, kwa, zi).