User:Apowell1/Language selection

This page details, in order of preference, three languages which I am interested in working on this semester. Note that this is a work-in-progress and subject to change over next 48 hours.

Lingala

Basic Information

Lingala is a language used frequently in both the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the Republic of the Congo (Congo). With slightly more than two million native speakers, it is found with greatest frequency in the northwestern portions of the DRC and in the northern half of the Congo.

Native Lingala Speakers by Country

Country / Geographic Area	Number of Speakers
Democratic Republic of the Congo	2,040,000
Republic of the Congo	90,600

Historically, the Congo was a colony of France for the first half of the twentieth century. Likewise, the Democratic Republic of the Congo was under Belgian rule during a similar time period. As a result, in both countries, French has maintained prevalence in the present day. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, French remains the official language, with Lingala comprising one of four indigenous languages considered "national languages," Kituba, Swahili, and Tshiluba being the other three. In the Republic of the Congo, French is the official language, with Lingala and Kituba considered the two national languages. It would be plausible that speakers of Lingala would know French, or one of the other national languages. Still, only 68.5 % of people in the DRC speak French, so it is far from certain that a speaker of Lingala would know French. As the official language of both countries, it is most likely that locally published material discussing Lingala is in French.

Based on this information, it seems quite clear that Lingala is far from threatened. With more than 2,000,000 native speakers and its designation as a national language in both the DRC and the Congo, it can quite easily be transmitted to future generations.

While Lingala is fairly widely known in many parts of the DRC and the Congo, it primarily a spoken, rather than a written language. This is, in part, due to the low literacy rates (estimated to be less than 30%) in areas of Africa where Lingala is spoken. As a result, there can be quite a bit of variance in its orthography. At a most basic level, the Latin alphabet is used. Lingala has seven vowels, with 'e' and 'o' being used to represent a high and low tone version. Some writing systems use the characters 'ɛ' and 'ɔ' to make this disticntion, but many, including major websites, do not. Additionally, the use of accents can be somewhat inconsistent. Generally, though, Lingala has 35 letters and digraphs, with accents being used on vowels to denote tone.

Lingala uses ISO code lin.