| Ngala | |
|---|---|
| Spoken in | Democratic Republic of the Congo |
| Native speakers | few; 3.5 million as trade language (1991) |
| Language family | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | bxg |
Bangala, or Ngala, is a Bantu language spoken in the northeast part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in South Sudan, and the extreme western part of Uganda. A divergent form of Lingala, it's used as a lingua franca by people with different languages and rarely as a first language. The estimated number of speakers varies between 2 and 3.5 million.[1] It is spoken to the east and northeast of the area where Lingala is spoken.
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As Lingala spread west and south, its vocabulary was replaced more and more by tribal and regional languages, and it became more of an interlanguage (a language that is a mix of two or more languages) and was classified as a separate language - Bangala. The vocabulary of Bangala varies depending on the first language of the speakers.
Around the 1980s, with the popularity and increased availability of Lingala in modern music, 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.[2]