Geographic distribution of Lingala speakers, showing regions of native speakers (dark green) and regions where Lingala is spoken by a minority. (light green)
Lingala (orNgala, Lingala:Lingála) is aBantu language spoken in the northwest of theDemocratic Republic of the Congo, the northern half of theRepublic of the Congo, in their capitals,Kinshasa andBrazzaville, and to a lesser degree as a trade language or because of emigration in neighbouringAngola orCentral African Republic. Lingala has 20 million native speakers and about another 20 million second-language speakers, for an approximate total of 40 million speakers.[1] A significant portion of both Congolese diasporas speaks Lingala in their countries of immigration likeBelgium,France or theUnited States.
Before 1880,Bobangi was an important trade language on the western sections of theCongo River, betweenStanley Pool (Kinshasa) and the confluence of the Congo andUbangi rivers (Republic of Congo and Democratic Republic of Congo).[3] When the first Europeans and their West- and East-African troops started founding state posts for the Belgian king along this river section in the early 1880s, they noticed the widespread use and prestige of Bobangi.[4] They attempted to learn it, but only cared to acquire an imperfect knowledge of it, a process that gave rise to a new, strongly restructured variety, called "the trade language", "the language of the river", or "Bobangi-pidgin", among other names.[5][6] In 1884, Europeans introduced this restructured variety of Bobangi in the state postBangala Station to communicate with local Congolese, some of whom had second-language knowledge of original Bobangi, and with the Congolese from more remote areas whom missionaries and colonials had been relocating to the station by force.[7] Thelanguage of the river was therefore soon renamed "Bangala", a label the Europeans had since 1876 also been using as a convenient, but erroneous and non-original[8][9][10] ethnic name for all Congolese of that region.[11]
Around 1901–2,CICM missionaries started a project to "purify" theBangala language by cleansing it from the "impure", pidginlike features it had acquired when it emerged out of Bobangi in the early 1880s.
Around and shortly after 1901, a number of both Catholic and Protestant missionaries working in the western and northern Congo Free State, independently of one another but in strikingly parallel terms, judged that Bangala as it had developed out of Bobangi was too "pidgin like", "too poor" a language to function as a proper means of education and evangelization. Each of them set out on a program of massive corpus planning, aimed at actively "correcting" and "enlarging" Bangala from above [...]. One of them was the Catholic missionary Egide De Boeck of the Congregatio Immaculati Cordis Mariae (CICM, commonly known as "the Missionaries of Scheut" or "Scheutists"), who arrived in Bangala Station – Nouvelle Anvers in 1901. Another one was the Protestant missionary Walter H. Stapleton [...], and a third one the Catholic Léon Derikx of the Premonstratensian Fathers [...]. By 1915, De Boeck's endeavors had proven to be more influential than Stapleton's, whose language creative suggestions, as the Protestant missionaries' conference of 1911 admitted, had never been truly implemented [...]. Under the dominance of De Boeck's work, Derikx's discontinued his after less than 10 years.[12]
Lingala's importance as avernacular has since grown with the size and importance of its main centers of use,Kinshasa andBrazzaville; with its use as thelingua franca of the armed forces; and with the popularity ofsoukous music.
At first the language the European pioneers and their African troops had forged out of Bobangi was called "the river language", "the trade language", and other volatile names. Beginning in 1884, it was called "Bangala", due to its introduction inBangala Station. After 1901, Catholic missionaries ofCICM, also called the Congregation of Scheutists, proposed to rename the language "Lingala". It took some decades for this to be generally accepted both by colonials and the Congolese.[13] The nameLingala first appears in writing in a 1901-2 publication by theCICM missionaryÉgide De Boeck.[14] This name change was accepted in western and northwestern Congo, and in other countries where the language was spoken, but not in northeastern Congo, where the variety of the language spoken locally is still calledBangala.[15]
Linguistically, Lingala is a dialect or variant of Bobangi, a popular or commercial Bobangi, that is, a Bobangi lingua franca spoken by non-native speakers.[16][17] Lingala has also been referred to by the following names: "bad Bobangi",[18] "Sabir of Bobangi",[19] "deformed and mixed Bobangi",[20] "Bobangi of treaties",[21] "patois of Bobangi and Kilolo[22]", and "the new language of the Bobangi".[23]
Lingala is a Bantu language of Central Africa[24] with roots in the Bobangi language, which provided most of its lexicon and grammar.[25] In its basic vocabulary, Lingala also borrows from other languages, such asKikongo varieties,Ubangian languages,Swahili,French,Portuguese,English, and various African languages (note local and foreign interaction with Krumen).
In practice, the extent of borrowing varies widely with speakers of different regions (commonly among young people), and during different occasions.
The Lingala language can be divided into severalregiolects andsociolects. The major regional varieties are northwestern Lingala, Kinshasa Lingala and Brazzaville Lingala.
Literary Lingala (lingala littéraire orlingala classique in French) is a standardized form used mostly in education and news broadcasts on state-owned radio or television and in Roman Catholic religious services, It is taught as a subject at some educational levels. It is historically associated with the work of the Catholic Church, the BelgianCICM missionaries in particular. It has a seven-vowel system (/a//e//ɛ//i//o//ɔ//u/) with an obligatory tense-laxvowel harmony. It also has a full range of morphological noun prefixes with mandatory grammatical agreement system with subject–verb, or noun–modifier for each of class. It is largely used in formal functions and in some forms of writing. Most native speakers of Spoken Lingala and Kinshasa Lingala consider it incomprehensible.[28]
Northwestern (orEquateur) Lingala is the product of the (incomplete) internalization by Congolese of the prescriptive rules the CICM missionaries intended when designing Literary Lingala.[29][30] The northwest is a zone where the CICM missionaries strongly supported the network of schools.
Spoken Lingala (calledlingala parlé in French) is the variety mostly used in Lingalaphones' day-to-day lives. It has a full morphological noun prefix system, but the agreement system in the noun phrase is laxer than the literary variety's. There is a five-vowel system and no vowel harmony. Spoken Lingala is largely used in informal functions, and the majority of Lingala songs use spoken Lingala. Modern spoken Lingala is influenced by French; French verbs, for example, may be "lingalized", adding Lingala inflection prefixes and suffixes: "acomprenaki te" or "acomprendraki te" ("he did not understand", using the French wordcomprendre) instead of classic Lingala "asímbaki ntína te" (literally: "s/he grasped/held the root/cause not"). These French influences are more prevalent in Kinshasa and indicate an erosion of the language as education in French becomes accessible to more of the population. There are pronunciation differences between "Catholic Lingala" and "Protestant Lingala", for example nzala/njala ("hunger").
Lingala ya Bayankee (sometimes calledYanké) is a sociolect widely used in Kinshasa, e.g., by street youth, street vendors, criminal gangs and homeless children.[31]Langila is a little-studied language game (or ludic practice) musicians initially created shortly after 2000 that is increasingly used in social media and sites of cultural production.
Lingala words showvowel harmony to some extent. The close-mid vowels/e/ and/o/ normally do not mix with the open-mid vowels/ɛ/ and/ɔ/ in words. For example, the wordsndɔbɔ 'fishhook' andndobo 'mouse trap' are found, but not*ndɔbo or*ndobɔ.
The Lingala spoken in Kinshasa shows a vowel shift from/ɔ/ to/o/, leading to the absence of the phoneme/ɔ/ in favor of/o/. The same occurs with/ɛ/ and/e/, leading to just/e/. So in Kinshasa, a native speaker will saymbóte as/ᵐbóte/, compared to the more traditional pronunciation,/ᵐbɔ́tɛ/.
Lingala is atonal language. Tone is a distinguishing feature inminimal pairs, e.g.:mutu (human being) andmutú (head), or kokoma (to write) and kokóma (to arrive). There are two main tones, low and high, and two less common ones: starting high, dipping low, and ending high, all within the same vowel sound, e.g.,mǐso (eyes); and starting low, rising high, and ending low, e.g., bôngó (therefore).
Akin to allBantu languages, Lingala has anoun class system in which nouns are classified according to theprefixes they bear and the prefixes they trigger in sentences. The table below shows Lingala's noun classes ordered according to the numbering system widely used in descriptions of Bantu languages.
Class
Noun prefix
Example
Translation
1
mo-
mopési
giver
2
ba-
bapési
givers
3
mo-
mokíla
tail
4
mi-
mikíla
tails
5
li-
liloba
word
6
ma-
maloba
words
7
e-
elɔ́kɔ
thing
8
bi-
bilɔ́kɔ
things
9
m-/n-
ntaba
goat
10
m-/n-
ntaba
goats
9a
Ø
sánzá
moon
10a
Ø
sánzá
moons
11
lo-
lolému
tongue
14
bo-
bosɔtɔ
dirt
15
ko-
kosála
to work (infinitive)
Individual classes pair up to form singular/plural pairs, sometimes called genders. There are seven genders. The singular classes 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9 take their plural forms from classes 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, respectively. Additionally, many household items found in class 9 take a class 2 prefix (ba) in the plural:lútu →balútu 'spoon',mésa →bamésa 'table',sáni →basáni 'plate'. Words in class 11 usually take a class 10 plural. Most words from class 14 (abstract nouns) do not have a plural counterpart.
Class 9 and 10 have a nasal prefix, whichassimilates to the following consonant. Thus, the prefix shows up as 'n' on words that start witht ord, e.g.ntaba 'goat', but as 'm' on words that start withb orp (e.g.mbísi 'fish'). There is also a prefixless class 9a and 10a, exemplified bysánzá →sánzá 'moon(s) or month(s)'. Possible ambiguities are resolved by context.
Noun class prefixes show up not only on the noun itself, but as markers throughout a sentence. In the sentences below, the class prefixes are underlined. (There is a special verbal form 'a' of the prefix for class 1 nouns.)
'(Let) people praise Your name' (a sentence from the Lord's Prayer)
To a certain extent, noun class allocation issemantically governed. Classes 1/2, as in all Bantu languages, mainly contain words for human beings; similarly, classes 9/10 contain many words for animals. In other classes, semantical regularities are mostly absent or obscured by many exceptions.
Lingala is more a spoken than a written language, and has several different writing systems, most of them ad hoc. As literacy in Lingala tends to be low, its popular orthography is very flexible and varies among the two republics. Some orthographies are heavily influenced by French; influences include a double S,ss, to transcribe [s] (in the Republic of the Congo);ou for [u] (in the Republic of the Congo); i with trema,aï, to transcribe[áí] or[aí]; e with acute accent,é, to transcribe [e];e to transcribe[ɛ], o with acute accent, ó, to transcribe[ɔ] or sometimes [o] in opposition to o transcribing [o] or[ɔ]; i or y can both transcribe [j]. The allophones are also found as alternating forms in the popular orthography;sango is an alternative tonsango (information or news);nyonso,nyoso,nionso,nioso (every) are all transcriptions ofnyɔ́nsɔ.
In 1976, theSociété Zaïroise des Linguistes (Zairian Linguists Society) adopted a writing system for Lingala, using the open e(ɛ) and the open o(ɔ) to write the vowels[ɛ] and[ɔ], and sporadic usage of accents to mark tone, though the limitation of input methods prevents Lingala writers from easily using theɛ andɔ and the accents. For example, it is almost impossible to type Lingala according to that convention with a common English or French keyboard. The convention of 1976 reduced the alternative orthography of characters but did not enforce tone marking. The lack of consistent accentuation is lessened by contextual disambiguation.
The popular orthographies are often more simplified and ambiguous than the academic-based ones. Many Lingala books, papers, the translation of theUniversal Declaration of Human Rights, Internet forums, newsletters, and major websites such as Google's Lingala do not use the Lingala-specific characters ɛ and ɔ. Tone marking is found in most literary works.
The Lingala alphabet has 35letters anddigraphs. Each digraph has a specific place in the alphabet; for example,mza comes beforemba, because the digraphmb follows the letterm. The lettersr andh are rare but present in borrowed words. Accents indicate the tones as follows:
I moved to Luanda in January this year due to a new job that I had applied for last year. I am happy that I got it and now I'm thinking of building a house in Mbanza Kongo next year so that my family can have a house.
Nabimoli na luanda na sanza ya yambo ya mobu moye mpo na mosala namikomisaki mobu moleki. Nasepeli kozwa mwango mpé nakani kotonga ndako na Mbanza-Kongo na mobu mokoya mpo na libota lya nga bazala na esika
TheMandombe script is anabugida, primarily used to writeKikongo, that can also be used for Lingala. It is used as a liturgical script in the church ofKimbangu.
^Harms, Robert W. (1981).River of wealth, river of sorrow: The central Zaire basin in the era of the slave and ivory trade, 1500–1891. Yale University Press.
^Samarin, William (1989).The Black man's burden: African colonial labor on the Congo and Ubangi rivers, 1880–1900. Westview Press.
^Meeuwis, Michael (2020).A Grammatical Overview of Lingala. Lincom.
^For linguistic sources, seeHammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017)."Pidgin Bobangi".Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
^Mumbanza, mwa Bawele Jérôme (1971).Les Bangala et la première décennie du poste de Nouvelle-Anvers (1884–1894). Kinshasa: Université Lovanium.
^Mbulamoko, Nzenge M. (1991). "Etat des recherches sur le lingala comme groupe linguistique autonome: Contribution aux études sur l'histoire et l'expansion du lingala".Annales Aequatoria.12:377–406.
^Burssens, Herman (1954). "The so-called "Bangala" and a few problems of art-historical and ethnographical order".Kongo-Overzee.20 (3):221–236.
^Samarin, William J. (1989).The Black man's burden: African colonial labor on the Congo and Ubangi rivers, 1880–1900. Westview Press.
^Mumbanza, mwa Bawele Jérome (1995). "La dynamique sociale et l'épisode colonial: La formation de la société "Bangala" dans l'entre Zaïre-Ubangi".Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines.29:351–374.
^Meeuwis, Michael (2020).A grammatical overview of Lingala: Revised and extended edition. München: Lincom. pp. 24–25.ISBN9783969390047.
^Meeuwis, Michael (2020).A Grammatical Overview of Lingala. München: Lincom. p. 27.ISBN9783969390047.
^Meeuwis, Michael (2020).A grammatical overview of Lingala: Revised and extended edition. München: Lincom. p. 26.ISBN978-3-96939-004-7.
^Kazadi, Ntole (1987). "Rapport Général".Linguistique et Sciences Humaines.27: 287.
^De Boeck, Louis B. (1952).Manuel de lingala tenant compte du langage parlé et du langage littéraire. Brussels: Schuet.
^Bokamba, Eyamba G.; Bokamba, Molingo V. (2004).Tósolola na Lingála: A multidimensional approach to the teaching and learning of Lingála as a foreign language. Madison: NALRC.
^Nassenstein, Nico. "Democratic Republic of the Congo: lingala ya Bayankee/Yanké." InUrban Contact Dialects and Language Change, pp. 28–46. Routledge, 2022.
Bokamba, Eyamba George et Bokamba, Molingo Virginie. Tósolola Na Lingála: Let's Speak Lingala (Let's Speak Series). National African Language Resource Center (May 30, 2005)ISBN0-9679587-5-X
Guthrie, Malcolm &Carrington, John F. (1988)Lingala: grammar and dictionary: English-Lingala, Lingala-English. London: Baptist Missionary Society.
Meeuwis, Michael (2020) 'A grammatical overview of Lingala: Revised and extended edition'. (Studies in African Linguistics vol. 81). München: LINCOM Europa.ISBN978-3-96939-004-7
Samarin, William J. (1990) 'The origins of Kituba and Lingala',Journal of African Languages and Linguistics, 12, 47–77.
Bwantsa-Kafungu,J'apprends le lingala tout seul en trois mois'. Centre de recherche pédagogique, Centre Linguistique Théorique et Appliquée, Kinshasa 1982.
Khabirov, Valeri. (1998) "Maloba ma nkota Russ-Lingala-Falanse. Русско-лингала-французский словарь". Moscow: Institute of Linguistics-Russian Academy of Sciences (соавторы Мухина Л.М., Топорова И.Н.), 384 p.
.svg)
