[1] A significant portion of both Congolese diasporas speaks Lingala in their countries of immigration like Belgium, France or the United States.

[3] 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.

[5][6] 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.

[7] 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[8][9][10] ethnic name for all Congolese of that region.

[11] Around 1901–2, 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.

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 [...].

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 [...].

After 1901, Catholic missionaries of CICM, also called the Congregation of Scheutists, proposed to rename the language "Lingala".

[13] The name Lingala first appears in writing in a 1901-2 publication by the CICM missionary Égide De Boeck.

[23] Lingala is a Bantu-based creole of Central Africa[24] with roots in the Bobangi language, which provided most of its lexicon and grammar.

French Spanish Portuguese English The Lingala language can be divided into several regiolects and sociolects.

It also has a full range of morphological noun prefixes with mandatory grammatical agreement system with subject–verb, or noun–modifier for each of class.

[31] Langila is a little-studied language game (or ludic practice) musicians initially created shortly after 2000 that is increasingly used in social media and sites of cultural production.

The Lingala spoken in Kinshasa shows a vowel shift from /ɔ/ to /o/, leading to the absence of the phoneme /ɔ/ in favor of /o/.

Tone is a distinguishing feature in minimal pairs, e.g.: mutu (human being) and mutú (head), or kokoma (to write) and kokóma (to arrive).

The table below shows Lingala's noun classes ordered according to the numbering system widely used in descriptions of Bantu languages.

In 1976, the Société Zaïroise des Linguistes (Zairian Linguists Society) adopted a writing system for Lingala, using the open e (ɛ) and the open o (ɔ) to write the vowels [ɛ] and [ɔ], and sporadic usage of accents to mark tone, though the limitation of input methods prevents Lingala writers from easily using the ɛ and ɔ and the accents.