Kongo language
Bantu language spoken in Angola, Congo Brazzaville and Congo Kinshasa
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.
The public source identifies “Kongo language” as bantu language spoken in Angola, Congo Brazzaville and Congo Kinshasa. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Kongo, language and Bantu.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q33702. The Library of Congress control number is sh85072898. Authority coordinates are -4.500, 14.000. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1575, 1884 and 1885.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kongo language” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.