Lingala

Lingala
Ngala
Lingála
Native to	Democratic Republic of the Congo, Republic of the Congo
Region	Congo River
Speakers	L1: 27 million (2024)[1] L2: 32,000,000 million (2024)[1]
Language family	Niger–Congo? Atlantic–Congo Benue–Congo Southern Bantoid Bantu (Zone C) Bangi–Ntomba (C.30) Bangi–Moi Bangi Lingala
Dialects	Bangala
Writing system	African Reference Alphabet (Latin), Mandombe script
Official status
Official language in	Congo–Kinshasa (national language)  Congo-Brazzaville (national language)
Language codes
ISO 639-1	ln
ISO 639-2	lin
ISO 639-3	lin
Glottolog	ling1269
Guthrie code	C30B[2]
Linguasphere	99-AUI-f
Geographic distribution of Lingala speakers, showing regions of native speakers (dark green) and regions where Lingala is spoken by a minority. (light green)
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

Lingala (or Ngala, Lingala: Lingála) is a Bantu language 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 as a trade language or because of emigration in neighbouring Angola or Central African Republic. Lingala has 26 million native speakers and about over 32-36 million second-language speakers, for an approximate total of 60 to 62 million speakers.^[1] A significant portion of both Congolese diasporas speaks Lingala in their countries of immigration like Belgium, France or the United States.