Words R Us
- Lingala (lin)

Lingala is spoken in the northwest of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the northern half of the Republic of the Congo, in their capitals, Kinshasa and Brazzaville, and to a lesser degree in Angola, the Central African Republic and southern South Sudan. Lingala has 25–30 million native speakers and about 35 million second-language speakers, for a total of 60-65 million speakers.



Lingala is a Bantu-based creole of Central Africa with roots in the Bobangi language, the language that provided the bulk of its lexicon and grammar. In its basic vocabulary, Lingala also has many borrowings from various other languages, such as: Swahili, Kikongo varieties, French, Portuguese, and English.

The Lingala people are largely Christian, predominantly Roman Catholic, with estimates running 90% to 98%.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is widely considered one of the world's richest countries in natural resources; its untapped deposits of raw minerals are estimated to be worth in excess of US$24 trillion. Despite such vast mineral wealth, the economy of the DRC has declined drastically since the mid-1980s. The DRC generated up to 70% of its export revenue from minerals in the 1970s and 1980s and was particularly hit when resource prices deteriorated at that time. By 2005, 90% of the DRC's revenues derived from its minerals. Congolese citizens are among the poorest people on Earth. DR Congo consistently has the lowest, or nearly the lowest, nominal GDP per capita in the world.

Sources: Wikipedia
The Joshua Project