Sheng is embedded in a multilingual, multi-ethnic state where tens of languages and dialects are spoken. Therefore it is essential to understand the broader linguistic ecology in some detail as it relates to how Sheng is grafted upon the Swahili language. This short chapter will highlight some historical facts, with comments about Kenya's weak language policy, which has contributed to the existing stratification of language. While acknowledging the difficulties of providing an exact figure, scholars such as Webb & Kembo- Sure (2000) and Ogechi (2003) use the working figure of 42, which is also the de facto ‘official’ number of Kenyan languages. But in its catalogue of the languages of Kenya, Ethnologue's 19th edition (2016) lists 68 languages (Figure 4 Linguistic map of Kenya), of which seven are ‘non-indigenous’ (e.g. English, Hindi, etc), and about four ‘dying’ ones. These widely differing figures are a reflection of insufficient ethnographic research by state functionaries or trained scholars, and differences in counting methods and criteria of determining what is ‘language’ or ‘dialect’. There may also be an administrative need to ‘fix’ the number of languages at whichever figure, for policy planning, political or other reasons, as well as competing interests. For example, a commission established to revamp the nation's constitution declared 70 to be the number of Kenyan languages (CKRC 2002), and more recently, Ethnologue rejected a proposal to list Sheng as a ‘language’ in its catalogue of Kenyan languages (GoSheng, personal communication, December 2017). Clearly, no one should state categorically the exact number of languages spoken in Kenya, but through extrapolation from our own research, and from these published sources and older ones such as Whitely (1974) and Heine and Möhlig (1980), the more realistic number of languages of Kenya is 60.

The languages of Kenya reflect a diversity of families and subfamilies, and some mutual, cross-linguistic influences which naturally take place wherever different languages are in contact with each other. For example, some dialects of two major Western Bantu languages, Luhyia and Ekegusii (Kisii), have borrowed words from the regionally dominant Dholuo (Luo), a Nilotic language. Gikuyu, Kamba, and Ekegusii (Niger-Congo, Bantu) have also adopted extensively from neighboring Maa (Nilo-Saharan, Nilotic) dialects.