Kongo Language | Britannica

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• Brigham Young University - Exploring the Niger-Congo Languages

Kongo language Ask Anything Homework Help Also known as: Congo language, Kikongo language Written and fact-checked by Britannica Editors Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree.... Britannica Editors History Britannica AI Ask Anything Table of Contents Table of Contents Ask Anything

Kongo language, a Bantu language of the Benue-Congo branch of the Niger-Congo language family. Kongo is related to Swahili, Shona, and Bembe, among others. Kikongo is the name used by its speakers. There are many dialects of Kongo; San Salvador Kongo, spoken in Congo (Kinshasa) and Angola, has more than 1.5 million speakers and is often listed as a separate language because it is not mutually intelligible with other Kongo dialects. There are more than seven million native speakers of Kongo, many of whom live in western Congo (Kinshasa), where Kongo is a national language. The remaining native speakers live in Congo (Brazzaville) and northern Angola. An additional seven million Africans claim Kongo as a second language.

Kongo also called: Kikongo and also spelled Congo (Show more) Related Topics: Bantu languages (Show more) See all related content

Kongo was one of the first African languages to be studied and documented by Western scholars. The first such documentation came in 1591 when the Italian Filippo Pigafetta included several words in Kongo in a description of the Kongo area that he based on the work of an earlier Portuguese traveler. In 1650 a multilingual dictionary of Kongo that reportedly included explanations in Portuguese, Latin, and Italian was produced by Giacinto Brusciotto, also an Italian; however, material proof of the dictionary does not exist. In 1652 a 7,000-word dictionary of Kongo was produced, and in 1659 Brusciotto wrote the first grammatical analysis of Kongo. Brusciotto’s work is still praised for its accurate understanding of the nominal and verbal systems of Kongo, despite the lack of analogous systems in Latin or any other previously studied grammars.