View source for Lingala

==History==
{{anchor|Pidgin Bobangi}}Before 1880, [[Bangi language|Bobangi]] was an important trade language on the western sections of the [[Congo River]], between [[Stanley Pool]] ([[Kinshasa]]) and the confluence of the Congo and [[Ubangi River|Ubangi]] rivers (Republic of Congo and Democratic Republic of Congo).<ref>{{cite book |last1=Harms |first1=Robert W. |title=River of wealth, river of sorrow: The central Zaire basin in the era of the slave and ivory trade, 1500–1891 |date=1981 |publisher=Yale University Press}}</ref> When the first Europeans and their West- and East-African troops started founding state posts for the Belgian king along this river section in the early 1880s, they noticed the widespread use and prestige of Bobangi.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Samarin |first1=William |title=The Black man's burden: African colonial labor on the Congo and Ubangi rivers, 1880–1900 |date=1989 |publisher=Westview Press}}</ref> They attempted to learn it, but only cared to acquire an imperfect knowledge of it, a process that gave rise to a new, strongly restructured variety, called "the trade language", "the language of the river", or "Bobangi-pidgin", among other names.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Meeuwis |first1=Michael |title=A Grammatical Overview of Lingala |date=2020 |publisher=Lincom}}</ref><ref>For linguistic sources, see {{glotto|pidg1259|Pidgin Bobangi}}</ref> In 1884, Europeans introduced this restructured variety of Bobangi in the state post [[Bangala Station]] to communicate with local Congolese, some of whom had second-language knowledge of original Bobangi, and with the Congolese from more remote areas whom missionaries and colonials had been relocating to the station by force.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Mumbanza |first1=mwa Bawele Jérôme |title=Les Bangala et la première décennie du poste de Nouvelle-Anvers (1884–1894) |date=1971 |publisher=Université Lovanium |location=Kinshasa}}</ref> The ''language of the river'' was therefore soon renamed "Bangala", a label the Europeans had since 1876 also been using as a convenient, but erroneous and non-original<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Mbulamoko |first1=Nzenge M. |title=Etat des recherches sur le lingala comme groupe linguistique autonome: Contribution aux études sur l'histoire et l'expansion du lingala |journal=Annales Aequatoria |date=1991 |volume=12 |pages=377–406}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Burssens |first1=Herman |title=The so-called "Bangala" and a few problems of art-historical and ethnographical order |journal=Kongo-Overzee |date=1954 |volume=20 |issue=3 |pages=221–236}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |last1=Samarin |first1=William J. |title=The Black man's burden: African colonial labor on the Congo and Ubangi rivers, 1880–1900 |date=1989 |publisher=Westview Press}}</ref> ethnic name for all Congolese of that region.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Mumbanza |first1=mwa Bawele Jérome |title=La dynamique sociale et l'épisode colonial: La formation de la société "Bangala" dans l'entre Zaïre-Ubangi |journal=Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines |date=1995 |volume=29 |pages=351–374}}</ref>

Around 1901–2, [[Congregatio Immaculati Cordis Mariae|CICM]] missionaries started a project to "purify" the ''Bangala'' language by cleansing it from the "impure", pidginlike features it had acquired when it emerged out of Bobangi in the early 1880s.

<blockquote>Around and shortly after 1901, a number of both Catholic and Protestant missionaries working in the western and northern Congo Free State, independently of one another but in strikingly parallel terms, judged that Bangala as it had developed out of Bobangi was too "pidgin like", "too poor" a language to function as a proper means of education and evangelization. Each of them set out on a program of massive corpus planning, aimed at actively "correcting" and "enlarging" Bangala from above [...]. One of them was the Catholic missionary Egide De Boeck of the Congregatio Immaculati Cordis Mariae (CICM, commonly known as "the Missionaries of Scheut" or "Scheutists"), who arrived in Bangala Station – Nouvelle Anvers in 1901. Another one was the Protestant missionary Walter H. Stapleton [...], and a third one the Catholic Léon Derikx of the Premonstratensian Fathers [...]. By 1915, De Boeck's endeavors had proven to be more influential than Stapleton's, whose language creative suggestions, as the Protestant missionaries' conference of 1911 admitted, had never been truly implemented [...]. Under the dominance of De Boeck's work, Derikx's discontinued his after less than 10 years.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Meeuwis |first1=Michael |title=A grammatical overview of Lingala: Revised and extended edition |date=2020 |publisher=Lincom |location=München |isbn=9783969390047 |pages=24–25}}</ref></blockquote>

Lingala's importance as a [[vernacular]] has since grown with the size and importance of its main centers of use, [[Kinshasa]] and [[Brazzaville]]; with its use as the [[lingua franca]] of the armed forces; and with the popularity of [[soukous]] music.