Neno: Bibilia Takatifu

The Biblica Open Kiswahili Contemporary Version, known in Swahili as Neno: Bibilia Takatifu (Neno means Word), is Biblica's Bible for Swahili, the lingua franca of East Africa, spoken from the coast of Kenya and Tanzania deep into the interior of the continent. The text has been worked over for decades, as the copyright years show: 1984, 1989, 2009 and 2015. The open edition, called Toleo Wazi, is the one you have here.

The English name states the method: Contemporary Version. It translates from the originals and reaches for the Swahili people speak today, with sentences that sound natural and meaning that arrives whole. That is a different choice from the classic Union Version of the mid twentieth century, more formal and flavoured by another era.

On Midvash, Neno fills a practical gap: the SUV already here carries only the New Testament, and this version gives you both Testaments in full. Readers raised on the Union Version will notice familiar verses put differently, and where the original is ambiguous, the translator's choice is invisible without another version alongside. For careful study, read the two side by side in the New Testament.

It is free because Biblica, the publisher that holds the NIV, opened the text through open.bible under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0). You can read, quote and share it without asking, with credit to Biblica and the same license.