Bangala or Mɔnɔkɔ na bangála is a Bantu language spoken in the northeast corner of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it is also spoken in parts of South Sudan and some speakers are still found in the extreme western part of Uganda (e.g., Arua, Koboko).
Around the 1980s, with the popularity and increased availability of Lingala in modern music,[citation needed] young people in large villages and towns began adopting Lingala so much that their Bangala is becoming more of a dialect than a separate language.
The verb prefix ko-, meaning "to" in Lingala is instead ku-, as it is in Swahili, so "to be" in Bangala is kusara, not kosala.
Several old missionary sketches exist, most of them from the late 19th and early 20th century, e.g., Wtterwulghe (1899), MacKenzie (1910), Heart of Africa Mission (1916), van Mol (1927).
Currently, researchers from Ghent University, JGU Mainz and Goethe-Universität Frankfurt are working on a grammatical description of the language.