Tshiluba language

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"Tshiluba" redirects here. For the Zambian president, see Frederick Chiluba.
Tshiluba
Spoken in: Democratic Republic of the Congo 
Region: Kasai-Occidental and Kasai-Oriental provinces
Total speakers: 6,300,000 (1991)
Language family: Niger-Congo
 Atlantic-Congo
  Volta-Congo
   Benue-Congo
    Bantoid
     Southern
      Narrow Bantu
       Central
        L
         Luba
          Tshiluba
Language codes
ISO 639-1: lu
ISO 639-2: lua
ISO 639-3: lua
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Tshiluba (also called Luba-Kasai and Luba-Lulua) is a Bantu language spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where it is a national language.

Contents

[edit] Classification

Tshiluba belongs to the Bantu branch of the Niger-Congo languages. It is the language of the Baluba people.

[edit] Geographic distribution

Tshiluba is spoken by about 6.3 million people in the Kasaï Occidental and Kasaï Oriental provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

[edit] Dialects

There are significant dialect differences between the East Kasai Region (Luba people) and the West Kasai Region (Bena Lulua people).

[edit] Vocabulary

The Bantu word identified in June 2004 by Today's Translations, a British translation company, as the most untranslatable in the world: ilunga, in the Tshiluba tongue, means "a person ready to forgive any abuse the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time". However, it is more likely to be a personal name rather than a difficult word.

[edit] Sources

  • MacIntyre, Ben. Why do Koreans say 'a biscuit would be nice' instead of 'I want a biscuit'?, The Times, August 21, 2004.

[edit] External links


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