Kongo or Kikongo is a Bantu language spoken by the Kongo people living in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the Republic of the Congo, Gabon, and Angola. It is a tonal language. The vast majority of present-day speakers live in Africa. There are roughly seven million native speakers of Kongo in the above-named countries. An estimated five million more speakers use it as a second language.

Historically, it was spoken by many of those Africans who for centuries were taken captive, transported across the Atlantic, and sold as slaves in the Americas. For this reason, creolized forms of the language are found in ritual speech of Afro-American religions, especially in Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Suriname. It is also one of the sources of the Gullah language, which formed in the Low Country and Sea Islands of the United States Southeast, and a major source of the Palenquero language of Colombia.

Geographic distribution Kikongo was the language of the Kingdom of Kongo prior to the creation of Angola by the Portuguese Crown in 1575. The Berlin Conference (1884–1885) among major European powers divided the rest of the kingdom into three territories. These are now parts of the DRC (Kongo Central and Bandundu), the Republic of the Congo, and Gabon.

Kikongo is the base for the Creole language Kituba, also called and Kikongo ya Leta (French and Kituba, respectively, for "Kikongo of the state administration" or "Kikongo of the State").

The constitution of the Republic of the Congo uses the name Kituba, and Democratic Republic of the Congo uses the term Kikongo (i.e. Kikongo ya Leta). This can be explained by the fact that Kikongo ya Leta is often mistakenly called Kikongo (i.e. KiNtandu, KiManianga, KiNdibu, etc.).Foreign Service Institute (U.S.) and Lloyd Balderston Swift, Kituba; Basic Course, Department of State, 1963, p. 10Godefroid Muzalia Kihangu, Bundu dia Kongo, une résurgence des messianismes et de l'alliance des Bakongo?, Universiteit Gent, België, 2011, p. 30

Kikongo and Kituba are spoken in: South of Republic of the Congo: Kikongo (Yombe, Vili, Ladi, Sundi, etc.) and Kituba: Kouilou, Niari, Bouenza, Lékoumou, south of Brazzaville, Pointe-Noire, Kikongo (Ladi, Kongo Boko, etc.): Pool; South-west of Democratic Republic of the Congo: Kikongo (Yombe, Ntandu, Ndibu, Manyanga, etc.) and Kikongo ya Leta: Kongo Central, a part of Kinshasa, Kikongo ya Leta: Kwilu, Kwango, Mai-Ndombe, far west Kasaï; North of Angola: Kikongo (Kisikongo, Zombo, Ibinda, etc.): Cabinda, Uíge, Zaire, north of Bengo and north of Cuanza Norte; South-West of Gabon. Kikongo (Vili): Nyanga, Ngounié

Presence in the Americas Many African slaves transported in the Atlantic slave trade spoke Kikongo. Its influence can be seen in many creole languages in the diaspora, such as: Brazil Cupópia Salto de Pirapora Colombia Palenquero San Basilio de Palenque Cuba Habla Congo/Habla Bantu None; liturgical language of the Afro-Cuban Palo religion. Haiti Haitian Creole Haiti Bahamas Cuba Dominican Republic United States Langaj None; liturgical language of the Haitian Vodou religion. Suriname Saramaccan language Boven Suriname Brokopondo Paramaribo French Guiana Netherlands United States Gullah Gullah-Geechee Corridor (North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida) Louisiana Creole Louisiana; and neighboring states.

People Prior to the Berlin Conference, the people called themselves "Bisi Kongo" (plural) and "Mwisi Kongo" (singular). Today they call themselves "Bakongo" (pl.) and "Mukongo" (sing.).Wyatt MacGaffey, Kongo Political Culture: The Conceptual Challenge of the Particular, Indiana University Press, 2000, p. 62

Writing

Kongo was the earliest Bantu language to be written in Latin characters. Portuguese created a dictionary in Kongo, the first of any Bantu language. A catechism was produced under the authority of Diogo Gomes, who was born in 1557 in Kongo to Portuguese parents and became a Jesuit priest. No version of that survives today.

In 1624, Mateus Cardoso, another Portuguese Jesuit, edited and published a Kongo translation of the Portuguese catechism compiled by Marcos Jorge. The preface says that the translation was done by Kongo teachers from São Salvador (modern Mbanza Kongo) and was probably partially the work of Félix do Espírito Santo (also a Kongo).François Bontinck and D. Ndembi Nsasi, Le catéchisme kikongo de 1624. Reeédtion critique (Brussels, 1978)

The dictionary was written in about 1648 for the use of Capuchin missionaries. The principal author was Manuel Robredo, a secular priest from Kongo (after he became a Capuchin, he was named Francisco de São Salvador). The back of this dictionary includes a two-page sermon written in Kongo. The dictionary has some 10,000 words.

In the 1780s, French Catholic missionaries to the Loango coast created additional dictionaries. Bernardo da Canecattim published a word list in 1805.

Baptist missionaries who arrived in Kongo in 1879 (from Great Britain) developed a modern orthography of the language.

American missionary W. Holman Bentley arranged for his Dictionary and Grammar of the Kongo Language to be published by the University of Michigan in 1887. In the preface, Bentley gave credit to Nlemvo, an African, for his assistance. He described "the methods he used to compile the dictionary, which included sorting and correcting 25,000 slips of paper containing words and their definitions." Eventually W. Holman Bentley, with the special assistance of João Lemvo, produced a complete Christian Bible in 1905.

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has published a translation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Fiote.

Standardisation The work of English, Swedish and other missionaries in the 19th and 20th centuries, in collaboration with Kongo linguists and evangelists such as Ndo Nzuawu Nlemvo (or Ndo Nzwawu Nlemvo; Dom João in Portuguese) and Miguel NeKaka, marked the standardisation of Kikongo.William Holman Bentley, Dictionary and grammar of the Kongo language as spoken at San Salvador, the ancient capital of the old Kongo Empire, Baptist Missionary Society, The University of Michigan, 1887Karl Edvard Laman, Nkanda wa bilekwa bianza uzayulwanga mpangulu ye nkadulu au, Svenska missionsförbundet, S.M.S., Matadi, 1899Karl Edvard Laman, Dictionnaire kikongo-français, avec une étude phonétique décrivant les dialectes les plus importants de la langue dite Kikongo, bruxelles : Librairie Falk fils, 1936

Linguistic classification Kikongo belongs to the Bantu language family.

Malcolm Guthrie classified Kikongo in the language group H10, the Kongo languages. Other languages in the same group include Bembe (H11). Ethnologue 16 counts Ndingi (H14) and Mboka (H15) as dialects of Kongo, though it acknowledges they may be distinct languages.

Bastin, Coupez and Man's classification of the language (as Tervuren) is more recent and precise than that of Guthrie on Kikongo. The former say the language has the following dialects:

Kikongo group H16 Southern Kikongo H16a Central Kikongo H16b Yombe (also called Kiyombe) H16cMaho 2009 Fiote H16d Western Kikongo H16d Bwende H16e Ladi (Lari) H16f Eastern Kikongo H16g Southeastern Kikongo H16h

NB:Jasper DE KIND, Sebastian DOM, Gilles-Maurice DE SCHRYVER et Koen BOSTOEN, Fronted-infinitive constructions in Kikongo (Bantu H16): verb focus, progressive aspect and future, KongoKing Research Group, Department of Languages and Cultures, Ghent University, Université Libre de Bruxelles, 2013Koen Bostoen et Inge Brinkman, The Kongo Kingdom: The Origins, Dynamics and Cosmopolitan Culture of an African Polity, Cambridge University Press, 2018Raphaël Batsîkama Ba Mampuya Ma Ndâwla, L'ancien royaume du Congo et les Bakongo, séquences d'histoire populaire, L'harmattan, 2000 Kisikongo is not the protolanguage of the Kongo language cluster. Not all varieties of Kikongo are mutually intelligible (for example, 1. Civili is better understood by Kiyombe- and Iwoyo-speakers than by Kisikongo- or Kimanianga-speakers; 2. Kimanianga is better understood by Kikongo of Boko and Kintandu-speakers than by Civili or Iwoyo-speakers).

Phonology

+Consonant phonemes Labial Coronal DorsalNasal m n (ng )Plosivep t k mp nt nk b d (g )1mb nd ng 2Fricativef s mf ns v z mv nz Approximant w l y

Vowel phonemesFrontBackHighi u Mide o Lowa The phoneme can occur, but is rarely used. May also be heard as a nasal sound. There is contrastive vowel length. /m/ and /n/ also have syllabic variants, which contrast with prenasalized consonants.

Grammar

Noun classes Kikongo has a system of 18 noun classes in which nouns are classified according to noun prefixes. Most of the classes go in pairs (singular and plural) except for the locative and infinitive classes which do not admit plurals.Amélia Arlete MINGAS, ETUDE GRAMMATICALE DE L'IWOYO (ANGOLA), UNIVERSITE RENE DESCARTES PARIS - UFR DE LINGUISTIQUE GENERALE ET APPLIQUEE, 1994 (in French)Luntadila Nlandu Inocente, Nominalisations en kìsìkongò (H16): Les substantifs predicatifs et les verbes-supports Vánga, Sála, Sá et Tá (faire), Facultat de Filosofia i Lletres, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, 2015 (in French)Elise Solange Bagamboula, Les classificateurs BU (CL. 14), GA (CL. 16), KU (CL. 17) et MU (CL. 18) dans l'expression de la localisation en kikongo (lari), Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO), 2019 (in French)Audrey Mariette TELE-PEMBA, Eléments pour une approche comparée des emprunts lexicaux du civili du Gabon, du Congo-Brazzaville et du Cabinda : proposition d' un modèle de dictionnaire, UNIVERSITE OMAR BONGO – Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines – Département des Sciences du Langage, Libreville, 2009 (in French)R. P. L. DE CLERCQ, Grammaire du Kiyombe, Edition Goemaere – Bruxelles – Kinshasa, 1907 (in French)Léon Dereau, COURS DE KIKONGO, Maison d'éditions AD. WESMAEL-CHARLIER, Namur, 1955 (in French)François Lumwamu, Sur les classes nominales et le nombre dans une langue bantu, Cahiers d'Études africaines, 1970 (in French)Joaquim Mbachi, CAMINHOS DA GRAMÁTICA IBINDA, Cabinda (Angola), 2013 (in Portuguese)Robert Tinou, Abécédaire du kouilou zaab' ku tub' tchi vili, L'HARMATTAN, 2015 (in French)Filipe Camilo Miaca, Corpus lexical dos verbos em iwoyo e português, proposta de um dicionário bilingue de verbos em português e iwoyo, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, 2020 (in Portuguese)Guy Noël Kouarata, DICTIONNAIRE BEEMBE–FRANÇAIS, SIL-Congo, 2010 (in French)Raharimanantsoa Ruth, Petit guide d'orthographe et de grammaire KUNYI (KUNI), SIL-Congo, 2022 (in French)Emmanuel Ngizulu Nsemi, Longoka Kikongo, Paari éditeur, 2025JOSÉ LOURENÇO TAVARES, Gramática da língua do Congo (kikongo) (dialecto kisolongo), Composto e Impresso nas oficinas da Imprensa, Nacional de Angola, 1915 (in Portuguese)