Kitu Kidogo, Panya Route and Rolexand other words from parlances in East Africa are the latest entrants into the Oxford English Dictionary.
Kitu kidogo is a Swahili word for money offered or accepted as an inducement or bribe while panya route is a secret path or roundabout route, especially one used for smuggling.
The Oxford University Press explained that Swahili is the region’s main lingua franca and had contributed a large number of loan words to East African English since 1806.
In Swahili, kitu means ‘thing, item, or matter’, while kidogo is the prefixed form of dogo, ‘small, insignificant’.
On the other hand, panya route was originally coined in Sheng – the East African street language that mixes Swahili with English.
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