The Lingála-Kiswahili border in north-eastern Congo. Its origins in Belgian colonial state formation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Retained inflectional morphology in pidgins: A typological study

“…2. Michael Meeuwis (2001Meeuwis ( , 2002Meeuwis ( , 2006 has recently uncovered historical records of early LiNgala that indicate that LiNgala subsequently regained rather than retained its inflectional morphology. These records show that prior to 1884, pidgin Bobangi had undergone a serious reduction in its nominal prefix system, syntactic concordance, and verbal inflection.…”

Recruiting a nonlocal language for performing local identity: Indexical appropriations of Lingala in the Congolese border town Goma

“…11 Although the indexical appropriations cited below frequently involve instances of code-switching, we nevertheless chose to frame the discussion in terms of underlying indexical values. The reason is that the umbrella notion code-switching also comprises forms of language alternation in which indexical associations with usage contexts are not the primary source of situated meaning (see Meeuwis & Blommaert 1994 for a discussion of the nongeneralizability of approaching codes in terms of their presumed indexical values). This is all the more the case in a volatile sociolinguistic setting like the Rwandan-Congolese borderland, where various forms of hybridization exist side by side and linguistic boundaries prove highly permeable.…”

“…In the late 1880s, agents of the Free State returned to the area and launched a number of military campaigns to eradicate Zanzibari competition. As the Free State agents and their troops, who were recruited in the northwestern parts of the Congo, used a proto-form of Lingala for communicating with the local populations they encountered, these "Anti-Arab campaigns" also curtailed the further spread of Kiswahili and laid down the current Lingala-Kiswahili border (see Meeuwis 2006 for details). After the Belgian government took over the Congo in 1908, Lingala was more and more associated with the military, state power, and the capital Leopoldville, while Kiswahili became the language of the country's eastern economic epicenters, in particular the fertile Kivu and the mining province Katanga.…”

“…Lingala, of which the origins can be traced to a series of subsequent pidginization and creolization processes in the northeast of the DRC during the earliest stages of Belgian colonization (Meeuwis 2006(Meeuwis , 2009(Meeuwis , 2010, is today the native language of approximately 15 million speakers, while another 10 million use it as a lingua franca. The colonial era laid the basis for its institution and spread as one of the Congo's four languages of wider regional distribution (Meeuwis 2006(Meeuwis , 2010.…”

“…The colonial era laid the basis for its institution and spread as one of the Congo's four languages of wider regional distribution (Meeuwis 2006(Meeuwis , 2010. These four "national languages," as they are routinely called, top the country's 220 or so vernacular ethnic languages, each having a distinct area of distribution.…”