Kioo cha Lugha originally started as a journal of the Kiswahili Association of the University of Dar es Salaam under the auspices of the Department of Kiswahili of the same university. Its publication ceased after the decline of that association. This created an academic gap as Kiswahili and Mulika journals could not accommodate all papers on Kiswahili studies. As a result, from 1995 the Department of Kiswahili revamped the journal and published it as a ‘Kioo cha Lugha New Series’. Since 2009 the journal is run by the Institute of Kiswahili Studies after a merger of the Department of Kiswahili and the Institute of Kiswahili Research. Initially, all manuscripts were exclusively written in Swahili but to broaden readership and contribution, the journal accepted manuscripts written in Swahili or English. Today the journal has become one of the high ranked international journals of the University of Dar es Salaam.
ISSN 0856-552 X (print) & ISSN 2546-2210 (online)