Italian football giant AS Roma has launched a Swahili Twitter account to engage its followers in East, Central and Southern Africa.
It comes days after the club's English-language account used Swahili to congratulate Kenyan runner Eliud Kipchoge for becoming the first person in history to run a marathon under two hours.
Paul Rogers, Head of Strategy at AS Roma, said the tweet was well received and the club was later "inundated" with requests from African fans to launch a Swahili account.
The club already has a popular Pidgin-language account which has close to 20,000 followers.
The new account is the latest addition to the club's 14 other language services.
Rogers says that the Swahili launch will help break "communication barriers":
"The new Twitter account will allow us to directly engage with these fans in a way that suits them and is consistent with our strategy of breaking down the communication barriers between the club and our global fan base."
ROMA SWAHILI ADMIN IS HERE!!! pic.twitter.com/pY8t5M1jb8
— AS Roma Swahili (@ASRomaSwahili) October 16, 2019
Swahili has official language status in Tanzania and Kenya and is also widely spoken in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Comoros Islands.
It’s also spoken by smaller numbers in Burundi, Rwanda, northern Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique.
