Koffi Olomide Popular Congolese artist. Uses French and Lingala.
Konono No. 1
The band's line-up includes three electric likembés (bass, medium and treble), equipped with hand-made microphones built from magnets salvaged from old car parts, and plugged into amplifiers. There's also a rhythm section that uses traditional as well as makeshift percussion (pans, pots and car parts), three singers, three dancers and a sound system which involves blasting the music through megaphones. The musicians come from the Congo and Angola border region.
Note: Lingala is a official language in The Republic of the Congo and The Democratic Republic of the Congo. Along with Koongo, Luba-Kasai, Congo Swahili and French
In these countries with 3,999,000 and 63,655,000 inhabitants respectively, Lingala has 2.000.000 native speakers and around 8.000.000 second-language speakers:
The origins of Lingala lie in Bobangi, a language that was spoken along the Congo River between Lisala and Kinshasa. Bobangi functioned as a regional trade language before the genesis of the Congo Free State. In the last two decades of the 19th century, after King Leopold II of Belgium stimulated the exploration and occupation of the area, Bobangi came into wider use. The language was learned and influenced by intermediaries and interpreters of the Westerners and brought to the area from other parts of central and east Africa (e.g., (Zanzibar, Comoros and the Tanganyikan inland). The colonial administration, in need of a common language for the region, started to use the language for missionary and administrative purposes, calling it Bangala to set it apart from the old Bobangi. Around the turn of the century, CICM missionaries started a project to 'purify' the language in order to make it 'pure Bantu' again. (...) In the process of this 'purification', the term Bangala was replaced with Lingala, borrowing a prefix from one of the surrounding languages.
Endangered languages » Discussions
Lingala