Kongo language

Map of the area where Kongo and Kituba as the lingua franca are spoken

Kikongo and Kituba are spoken in :

• South of Republic of the Congo :
  • Kikongo (Yombe, Vili, Lari, Nsundi, etc.) and Kituba :
    • Kouilou,
    • Niari,
    • Bouenza,
    • Lékoumou,
    • south of Brazzaville,
    • Pointe-Noire,
  • Kikongo (Lari, Kongo Boko, etc.):
    • Pool;
• South-west of Democratic Republic of the Congo :
  • Kikongo (Yombe, Ntandu, Ndibu, Manyanga, etc.) and Kikongo ya Leta :
    • Kongo Central,
    • a part of Kinshasa,
  • Kikongo ya Leta :
    • Kwilu,
    • Kwango,
    • Mai-Ndombe,
    • far west Kasaï ;
• North of Angola :
  • Kikongo (Sansala, Zombo, Fiote, etc.):
    • Cabinda,
    • Uíge,
    • Zaire,
    • north of Bengo and north of Cuanza Norte ;
• South-West of Gabon.
  • Kikongo (Vili) :
    • Nyanga,
    • Ngounié

The Hail Mary in Kikongo.

At present there is no standard orthography of Kikongo, with a variety in use in written literature, mostly newspapers, pamphlets and a few books.

Kongo was the earliest Bantu language which was committed to writing in Latin characters and had the earliest dictionary of any Bantu language. A catechism was produced under the authority of Diogo Gomes, a Jesuit born in Kongo of Portuguese parents in 1557, but no version of it exists today.

In 1624, Mateus Cardoso, another Portuguese Jesuit, edited and published a Kongo translation of the Portuguese catechism of Marcos Jorge. The preface informs us that the translation was done by Kongo teachers from São Salvador (modern Mbanza Kongo) and was probably partially the work of Félix do Espírito Santo (also a Kongo).[12]

The dictionary was written in about 1648 for the use of Capuchin missionaries and the principal author was Manuel Robredo, a secular priest from Kongo (who became a Capuchin as Francisco de São Salvador). In the back of this dictionary is found a sermon of two pages written only in Kongo. The dictionary has some 10,000 words.

Additional dictionaries were created by French missionaries to the Loango coast in the 1780s, and a word list was published by Bernardo da Canecattim in 1805.

Baptist missionaries who arrived in Kongo in 1879 developed a modern orthography of the language.

W. Holman Bentley's Dictionary and Grammar of the Kongo Language was published in 1887. In the preface, Bentley gave credit to Nlemvo, an African, for his assistance, and described "the methods he used to compile the dictionary, which included sorting and correcting 25,000 slips of paper containing words and their definitions."[13] Eventually W. Holman Bentley with the special assistance of João Lemvo produced a complete Christian Bible in 1905.

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has published a translation of Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Fiote.

Kikongo belongs to the Bantu language family.

According to Malcolm Guthrie, Kikongo is in the language group H10, the Kongo languages. Other languages in the same group include Bembe (H11). Ethnologue 16 counts Ndingi (H14) and Mboka (H15) as dialects of Kongo, though it acknowledges they may be distinct languages.

According to Bastin, Coupez and Man's classification (Tervuren) which is more recent and precise than that of Guthrie on Kikongo, the language has the following dialects:

• Kikongo group H16
  • Southern Kikongo H16a
  • Central Kikongo H16b
  • Yombe (also called Kiyombe) H16c
  • Fiote H16d
  • Western Kikongo H16d
  • Bwende H16e
  • Lari H16f
  • Eastern Kikongo H16g
  • Southeastern Kikongo H16h

1. The phoneme /ɡ/ can occur, but is rarely used.

There is contrastive vowel length. /m/ and /n/ also have syllabic variants, which contrast with prenasalized consonants.

Conjugating the verb (mpanga in Kikongo) to be (kuena or kuwena; also kuba or kukala in Kikongo) in the present:[14]

Conjugating the verb (mpanga in Kikongo) to have (kuvua in Kikongo; also kuba na or kukala ye) in the present :

• The Southern American English word "goober", meaning peanut, comes from Kongo nguba.[15]
• The word zombie
• The word funk, or funky, in American popular music has its origin, some say, in the Kongo word Lu-fuki.[16]
• The name of the Cuban dance mambo comes from a Bantu word meaning "conversation with the gods".

In addition, the roller coaster Kumba at Busch Gardens Tampa Bay in Tampa, Florida gets its name from the Kongo word for "roar".

Many African slaves transported in the Atlantic slave trade spoke Kongo, and its influence can be seen in many creole languages in the diaspora, such as Palenquero (spoken by descendants of escaped black slaves in Colombia), Habla Congo/Habla Bantu (the liturgical language of the Afro-Cuban Palo religion), Saramaccan language in Suriname and Haitian Creole.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Kikongo.

Kongo edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• PanAfrican L10n page on Kongo
• Bentley, William Holman (1887). Dictionary and grammar of the Kongo language, as spoken at San Salvador, the ancient capital of the old Kongo empire, West Africa. Appendix. London Baptist Missionary Society. Retrieved 2013-05-23.
• Congo kiKongo Bible : Genesis. Westlind UBS. 1992. Retrieved 2013-05-23.
• OLAC resources in and about the Koongo language