Daktari alichunguza uti wa mgongo.

It breaks down like this:

a- = subject marker for a singular human subject
-li- = past tense
-chunguz- = verb root meaning examine / inspect / investigate
-a = the usual final vowel in an affirmative verb form

So alichunguza means he/she examined.

Not specifically. In Swahili, a- can mean he or she. It marks a singular human subject, but it does not show gender.

So Daktari alichunguza... can mean The doctor examined..., whether the doctor is male or female. Context tells you that, not the verb form.

Swahili normally does not use articles like English the and a/an.

That means daktari can mean doctor, a doctor, or the doctor, depending on context. The same is true for uti wa mgongo.

So learners often have to get used to reading definiteness from context instead of from a separate word.

Because daktari is a loanword, and many loanwords in Swahili do not show the usual class prefix clearly on the surface.

Even so, when daktari refers to one person, it behaves like a singular human noun and takes human agreement:

daktari alichunguza = the doctor examined

If you make it plural, you normally get:

madaktari walichunguza = the doctors examined

So the agreement matters more than the visible shape of the noun.

Here wa is the connector often translated as of.

So the structure is:

uti wa mgongo = literally the spine/backbone of the back

This X wa Y pattern is very common in Swahili. The main noun comes first, and the following noun tells you what it is connected with or belongs to.

Because this connector changes form to agree with the first noun, not the second one.

In uti wa mgongo, the first noun is uti, so the correct connector here is wa.

This is an important Swahili pattern: the equivalent of English of is not one fixed word. It changes depending on the noun it follows.

mgongo by itself means back.

uti wa mgongo is more specific: it refers to the spine, backbone, or in some contexts spinal cord, depending on how the meaning has been taught in your materials.

So if you say just mgongo, you are talking about the back generally. If you say uti wa mgongo, you are referring to the anatomical structure inside the back.

No. This sentence is completely normal as it is.

In Swahili, if the full object noun comes right after the verb, you often do not need an object marker:

Daktari alichunguza uti wa mgongo.

That is a straightforward and natural sentence.

You may also hear object markers in some contexts, especially when the object is very specific, already known, or being emphasized. But here, leaving it out is perfectly standard.

Yes, the basic order is very similar:

Daktari = subject
alichunguza = verb
uti wa mgongo = object

So the sentence follows Subject–Verb–Object, just like a basic English sentence.

The main difference is inside the noun phrase: Swahili often puts connected information after the noun, which is why you get uti wa mgongo rather than something structured exactly like English.

A few helpful points:

ch in chunguza sounds like the ch in church.

mgongo begins with an actual m sound plus g, so do not drop the m. It is roughly m-gong-go.

Also, Swahili vowels are usually pronounced clearly and consistently:

a as in father
i as in machine
u as in rule
o as in a pure o sound

A careful pronunciation of the whole sentence would be something like:

da-kta-ri a-li-chu-ngu-za u-ti wa m-go-ngo

Try to pronounce each vowel clearly rather than reducing them the way English often does.