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22-536: Kongo Central ( Kongo : Kongo dia Kati ), formerly Bas-Congo , is one of the 26 provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo . Its capital is Matadi . At the time of independence, the area now encompassing Kongo Central was part of the greater province of Léopoldville , along with the capital city of Kinshasa and the districts of Kwango , Kwilu and Mai-Ndombe . Under Belgian colonial rule,

44-640: A series of rapids that make it unnavigable until the Malebo Pool . The provincial capital is Matadi, with Boma being the other official city. The remainder of the province is administratively divided into ten territories, the most of any province: Before 2015 these territories were divisions of the Bas-Fleuve , Cataractes and Lukaya districts ; except for Moanda, which was attached to Boma (a city/district hybrid). Towns with their 2010 populations are: Kongo language Kongo or Kikongo

66-469: 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). The dictionary

88-604: 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

110-453: Is contrastive vowel length . /m/ and /n/ also have syllabic variants, which contrast with prenasalized consonants. 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. NB: Noun prefixes may or may not change from one Kikongo variant to another (e.g. class 7:

132-710: Is one of the Bantu languages 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

154-586: Is used as the term in the DRC administration. This can be explained by the fact that Kikongo ya Leta is often mistakenly called Kikongo (i.e. KiNtandu, KiManianga, KiNdibu, etc.). Kikongo and Kituba are spoken in: 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: Prior to the Berlin Conference ,

176-475: 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. A large proportion of the people at San Salvador, and in its neighbourhood, pronounce s and z before i as sh and j; for the sound sh, the letter x was adopted (as in Portuguese), while z before i

198-488: The Atlantic Ocean to the west. It borders the city-province of Kinshasa to the north-east, the province of Kwango to the east, and the Republic of Angola to the south as well as the Republic of the Congo and Cabinda to the north. The lower Congo River traverses the province from the north-east to the south-west. It is navigable from the Atlantic Ocean to the port city of Matadi after which there are

220-506: The Bantu language family. According to Malcolm Guthrie , Kikongo is 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

242-806: The Low Country and Sea Islands of the United States Southeast. The Palenquero creole in Colombia is also related to Kong creole. Kongo 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 ),

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264-586: The Republic of the Congo, and Gabon. Kikongo is the base for the Creole language Kituba , also called Kikongo de l'État 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 . Kituba (i.e. Kikongo ya Leta)

286-627: 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. The work of English, Swedish and other missionaries in

308-408: The language has the following dialects: NB: 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). There

330-516: The noun prefix ci is used in civili, iwoyo or ciladi (lari) and the noun prefix ki is used in kisikongo, kiyombe, kizombo, kimanianga,...). NB: Not all variants of Kikongo have completely the same personal pronouns and when conjugating verbs, the personal pronouns become stressed pronouns (see below and/or the references posted). Conjugating the verb ( mpanga in Kikongo) to be ( kukala or kuba ; also kuena , kwena or kuwena in Kikongo) in

352-477: The people called themselves "Bisi Kongo" (plural) and "Mwisi Kongo" (singular). Today they call themselves " Bakongo " (pl.) and "Mukongo" (sing.). 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

374-457: The present: Conjugating the verb ( mpanga in Kikongo) to have ( kuvua in Kikongo; also kuba na or kukala ye ) in the present : NB: In Kikongo, the conjugation of a tense to different persons is done by changing verbal prefixes (highlighted in bold). These verbal prefixes are also personal pronouns. However, not all variants of Kikongo have completely the same verbal prefixes and

396-455: The province was known as Bas-Congo (as in "Lower Congo River") and was renamed Kongo Central after independence. Under the regime of Mobutu Sese Seko from 1965 to 1997, the Congo river was renamed as Zaire . The province was named as Bas-Zaïre . The name was later reverted to Bas-Congo. It was subsequently renamed as Kongo Central in 2015. Kongo Central is the only province in the country with an ocean coastline; it has narrow frontage on

418-562: The same verbs (cf. the references posted). The ksludotique site uses several variants of Kikongo (kimanianga,...). In addition, the roller coaster Kumba at Busch Gardens Tampa Bay in Tampa, Florida gets its name from the Kongo word for "roar". According to Filomão CUBOLA, article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Fiote translates to: Kituba language Too Many Requests If you report this error to

440-633: 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

462-460: Was written as j. Our books are read over a much wider area than the district of San Salvador, and in those parts where s and z remain unchanged before i, the use of x and j has proved a difficulty; it has therefore been decided to use s and z only, and in those parts where the sound of these letters is softened before i they will be naturally softened in pronunciation, and where they remain unchanged they will be pronounced as written. Kikongo belongs to

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484-500: 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

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