Bangala (C30A)

Abstract Bangala (Mɔnɔkɔ na Bangala), is a Bantu language of north-eastern DRC which emerged in the late nineteenth century out of a pidgin, brought to borders of the Congo Free State by Force Publique troops. Closely related to Lingala (C.30b) and tied to its history, colonial agents and missionaries used Bangala for their purposes, but rarely implemented corpus-planning activities. This, and the intense contact with non-Bantu languages of the area, led to the development of distinctive phonological and morphosyntactic properties. In Bangala’s linguistic predecessor and modern Bangala areal contact-induced change has contributed to a radically reduced noun class system and the simplification of agreement to a mostly analytical structure. Bangala reveals neither bound subject nor object concords but uses absolute (personal) pronouns that precede the verb, and free-standing objects that follow the verb. Syntactically, negation functions with a clause-final negator, conditional clauses operate periphrastically, and relative clauses require a relativizer derived from a demonstrative. Today, Bangala is spoken by at least two million people, but this figure and its prestige are declining.