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The article presents an overview of the Kiarabu written tradition in the Swahili language in Arabic graphics, which has long been an important component of the Muslim Swahili civilization of the East African coast and the adjacent islands of the Indian Ocean, which united since the Middle Ages a number of port cities-sultanates located over a long stretch from the south of modern Somalia to the north Mozambique. During the colonial period, this type of literacy was gradually ousted from the culture due to the transition to the Latin alphabet within the framework of the project standardization of Swahili and its transition to the status of an official language in the British East Africa. Nevertheless, in recent history, there are cases when traditionalist poets, in order to manifest their Swahili identity, continue to record their compositions with the help of new author’s modifications of kiarabu.
Koyraboro Senni (KS), a Malian language of Songhay family, has a system of TAM markers that distinguish two aspectual categories – the perfective and the imperfective and three series – the “weak” series used in neutral declarative clauses and clauses with a non-subject focus, the subject-focus series, and the “strong” series, which is used for predicate-centered focus. The paper studies the use of the strong in-focus forms in a corpus of narrative texts and shows that the strong perfectives in most cases are used to describe real events, while strong imperfectives are irrealis-oriented. Contrary to implications of our current knowledge of polyfunctionality of in-focus forms the strong imperfective is not used for present progressive and is relatively frequent in narrative texts. I also argue that while the perfective part of the system is better understood as the result of development of typical intrinsically-focused reading – the perfect, its imperfective part is better explained in line with Tatevosov’s (2005) proposal of direct development of the habitual to the prospective.