Lingala language
| Lingala | |
|---|---|
| Ngala | |
| Lingála | |
| Native to | Democratic Republic of the Congo, Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, Angola |
| Region | Congo River |
|
Native speakers
|
5.5 million (2007) 7 million second-language speakers in DRC, including Bangala (1999); unknown number R. Congo |
|
Niger–Congo
|
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| Dialects | |
| African reference alphabet (Latin), Mandombe | |
| Official status | |
|
Official language in
|
None. National language of Democratic Republic of the Congo recognized in Republic of the Congo |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-1 | ln |
| ISO 639-2 | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | ling1263 |
C30B |
|
| Linguasphere | 99-AUI-f |
Geographic distribution of Lingala speakers, showing regions of native speakers (dark green) and other regions of use
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Lingala (Ngala) is a Bantu language spoken throughout the northwestern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and a large part of the Republic of the Congo, as well as to some degree in Angola and the Central African Republic. It has over 10 million speakers.
In the 19th century, before the creation of the Congo Free State, the Bangala (literally: 'river people') were a group of similar Bantu peoples living and trading along the bend of the Congo River that reached from Irebu at the mouth of the Ubangi River to the Mongala River. They spoke similar languages, such as Losengo, but their trade language was Bangi, which was the most prestigious language between Stanley Pool (Kinshasa) and Irebu. As a result, people upstream of the Bangala mistook Bangi for the language of the Bangala and called it Lingala (language of the Bangala), and European missionaries followed suit.
In the last two decades of the 19th century, after the forces of Leopold II of Belgium conquered the region and started exploiting it commercially, Bangi came into wider use. The colonial administration, in need of a common language for the region, started to use the language for administrative purposes. It had already simplified, compared to local Bantu languages, in its sentence structure, word structure and sounds, and speakers borrowed words and constructs liberally from other languages. However, the fact that speakers had very similar native languages prevented Lingala from becoming as radically restructured as Kituba, which developed among speakers of both Bantu and West African languages.
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Wikipedia