Lingala

It's very elegant, you know? And, um, and you have beautiful singing.

Um, the, the Congolese listen to the way the Cubans arrange their vocals, and in that they're singing in their own language, in Lingala.

And there, and the early stuff that you would have in the '50s, you really hear that it's, that it's modeling on the Cuban music.

But as time goes by, different things happening.

Yo, that's it.

You have now learned some grammatical markers in Lingala plus the examples of them for a better understanding and usages of those grammatical markers.

If today's lesson and the previous ones have really helped you a lot, give us a thumbs up, comment, share with others, sign up and subscribe.

I will see you next time.

At least 62 languages can be heard in the Congo Brazzaville.

Lingala is the first Congolese language I'd ever heard.

And I thought that was the Congolese language.

So I learned a lot.

So Lingala and Kituba are the national languages.

So remember we said Wapi, that was Kituba.

So Kituba or Munukutuba is a Creole language based on Kikongo.

Every week we would meet in this little studio on, I think it was a Tuesday evening, and he would teach us everything by ear.

So we were singing in Lingala, which is a Congolese language, French, English.

He's trilingual and casual.

And, yeah, so by the time we did our first show, we were a really tight band.

Consider the Bantu languages of Africa.

Linguists comparing languages such as Swahili, Zulu, Shona and Lingala can identify systematic correspondences in vocabulary and grammatical morphology.

For example, many Bantu languages preserve related noun class prefixes.

even though their exact forms differ from language to language.

you know, here's Setswana down here.

The light blue was sort of lingua franca, so mostly Swahili and Lingala, you know, so those are languages where guest and stranger are the same and it makes it look more blue, you know, but there's lots of holes, you know, through the lack of dictionaries.

But I think this, why would the word for guest and stranger be the same? That's a sort of cultural adaption to the fact that people are...

valuable.

A pastor told me his church had started doing exactly that.

And he said the turning point came the morning a Congolese member of the congregation taught them a song in Lingala and then explained before they sang it what the words had meant to people singing them during a war.

He said, Graham, We've sung about God being our refuge for 30 years.

And we never once needed it to be true in that way.

And after Antonio Inoki was given the Bomaye name by Ali following their own battle, Nakamura soon decided to name his devastating knee that as a tribute to the Japanese wrestling icon.

However, the fact Bomaye translates to "kill him" in the Bensu language of Lingala was likely a big reason behind the Bomaye becoming the Kinshasa in WWE, with that name also being linked to the Rumble in the Jungle due to it being the capital city of Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the event occurred.

Number two, Sandman came from a surfer gimmick.

Though a certain icon known as Sting may be the most famous surfer the wrestling business has ever known, he's actually not the only one.

Each week, I sit down to a conversation with multilinguals, where we discuss and celebrate language, life, and culture through our own perspectives.

Episode 110: Speaking Lingala.

[instrumental music] Hello, language lovers.

Thank you for joining me for this episode of Speaking Tongues, the podcast and conversation with multilinguals.

This week, we're talking about the Lingala language and Congolese culture with Melissa, the founder and teacher behind Lingala Lessons.

In this episode, Melissa tells us about growing up in Paris speaking both Lingala and French, and how this often felt like living in two different countries: France and DRC.

She tells us about how her parents made the effort to reinforce Lingala and their Congolese roots at home, and how Black American TV shows were impactful in African French communities.

We talk about Lingala grammar and learn how the language is used in DRC, Republic of Congo, and other Lingala-speaking regions.

... uh, before we moved to the States.

I, I remember, I remember, I even learned Lingala 'cause I spoke Kiswahili.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.I spoke Kiswa- I never spoke Kinyarwanda because the, the lady who used to take care of us-

... spoke Swahili.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? So that's what we picked up on, you know? And, and I remember l- learning Lingala from my cousin Kubi in Kinshasa.

And then that disappeared.