Lingala resources

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Henkkles
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Lingala resources

Postby Henkkles » Fri Apr 01, 2022 7:15 pm

Lingala is a Bantu based creole language spoken from the Kinshasa-Brazzaville area to Kisangani along the river Congo and its tributaries. Estimates on speaker amounts vary widely, but the most recent estimate I could find gives ~15 million L1 speakers and ~30 million L2 speakers. Lingala is not a monolithic language, but is often divided into two quite divergent language varieties called Kinshasa Lingala and Makanza Lingala. Kinshasa Lingala is a continuation of the Bobangi vehicular language, in which the Bantu gender-based concordance system has collapsed. Makanza Lingala was created by scheutist missionaries who travelled upstream and established mission posts. Their idea was to "rebantuize" this popular vehicular language and reinstate the Bantu gender agreement system, so that it could be used in their work as a common language between the indigenous peoples.

Physical books
Lingala-English dictionary (Dunwoody Press)
Lingala Parallel Texts CD audio (Dunwoody Press)
Parlons Lingala (L'Harmattan)
Dictionnaire étymologique Lingala-Français-Lingala (L'Harmattan)
Lingala Dictionary and Phrasebook (Hippocrene)
Yekola Lingala by Dwayne Wong Omowale (ISBN 978-1511650144)
Learn Lingala by Tracey Nyemba

Courses
FSI Lingala
Peace Corps Lingala
Udemy Lingala course

Miscellaneous web resources
Loba lingala! An English guide to the language of Kinshasa by Thomas Yocum (YoYo Publishing)
Mandla
Lingala - English dictionary by Felix Divuilu ed. (Congolese Voluntary Organisation)
Google Translate now supports Lingala!
Lingala.uk, a very comprehensive online dictionary with some grammar lessons as well

Linguistics and anthropology
Lingala Facile - Eine Kreolsprache wird repidginisiert by Irene Hofstetter (Akademikerverlag)
A Systematic Investigation of Mid-Vowel Sounds in Kinshasa Lingala: A Case of Extreme Contrast Reduction by Philothé Mwamba Kabasele, Ph.D. thesis (University of Calgary)
A grammatical overview of Lingála (2020) by Michael Meeuwis (University of Ghent), also available as a physical book at Lincom shop
A morphological explanation of Lingala for computational linguistics

News and other
Radio Okapi (Journal Lingala), news from the DRC
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User avatar
Henkkles
Green Belt
Posts: 277
Joined: Thu Apr 07, 2016 2:13 pm
Languages: N FI | A EN SV | I EE RU | B FR LN
x 796

Re: Lingala resources

Postby Henkkles » Thu Mar 09, 2023 5:44 pm

I reserve this post to some reviews of materials.

Review: Yekola Lingala by Dwayne Wong Omowale (ISBN 978-1511650144)
Not recommended. All of the information in this short work is available online and the author offers no unique insights. 60/90 of this booklet's pages are full of completely regular verb conjugation tables with some minor spelling errors. A few pages of useful phrases. You can safely skip this one.

Review: Learn Lingala by Tracey Nyemba
Not worth it. Skip skip skip. Everything is written in like twenty point font, the numerals 0-5 take an entire page. Half of the book is taken by an approximated pronunciation in the English orthography which is 20 times harder to read than the conventional Lingala orthography. Words are introduced but as they never come with plurals you're better off learning from something else. The book has some good phrases but if you need a phrasebook the Hippocrene one runs a million laps around this one.
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