Editing Comorian languages (section)

=== Shimwali ===
The Shimwali dialect was possibly one of the earliest Bantu languages to be recorded by a European. On July 3, 1613, Walter Payton claimed to have recorded 14 words on the island of [[Mohéli|Moheli]], stating "They speak a kind of [[Morisco]] language." [[Thomas Roe|Sir Thomas Roe]] and Thomas Herbert also claimed to have recorded vocabulary.<ref>Roe, Sir Thomas (1615). Observations Collected out of the Journal of Sir Thomas Roe, Knight, Lord Embassadour from His Majestie of Great Britaine, to the Great Mogol . . . I. Occurrents and Observations, in Samuel Purchas (1905) Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrimes,-ol. IV. Glasgow.</ref>

Until the 1970s, it was considered a dialect or archaic form of Swahili. This was first proposed in 1871, when Kersten suggested it might be a mixture of Shingazija, Swahili, and Malagasy. In 1919 Johnston, referring to it as  'Komoro Islands Swahili - the dialect of 'Mohila' and 'the 'Mohella' language', suggested that, taken together with the other two dialects in the Comoros, it might be an ancient and corrupt form of Swahili. However, Ottenheimer et al. (1976) found this to not be the case. Instead, they classify Shimwali, as well as the other Comorian languages, as a separate language group from Swahili.<ref name=":1">{{cite journal |last1=Ottenheimer |first1=Harriet Joseph |last2=Ottenheimer |first2=Martin |title=The Classification of the Languages of the Comoro Islands |journal=Anthropological Linguistics |date=1976 |volume=18 |issue=9 |pages=408–415 |jstor=30027589 }}</ref>