Ngbaka (''Ngbàkà'') is a

Gbaya language The Gbaya languages, also known as Gbaya–Manza–Ngbaka, are a family of perhaps a dozen languages spoken mainly in the western Central African Republic and across the border in Cameroon, with one language (Ngbaka) in the Democratic Republic o ...

spoken by just over a million people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is a regionally important language, used by the

Gilima The Mbaka or Bwaka language, ''Ngbaka Ma'bo'' (also called ''Gbaka, Ma'bo, Ngbwaka, Ngbaka Limba'') is a major Ubangian languages, Ubangian language spoken by the Mbaka people of Central African Republic, CAR and Congo. It's not clear how disti ...

, Ngbundu,

Mbandja Mbandja (Banja, Mbanza) is the largest of the Banda languages Banda is a family of Ubangian languages spoken by the Banda people of Central Africa. Banda languages are distributed in the Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Co ...

and Mono peoples, and is taught in primary schools; 10% are literate in Ngbaka. ''Ngbaka'' is a common local ethnic name; the language may be distinguished from other languages called "Ngbaka" as Ngbaka Gbaya or Ngbaka Minagende. There are no significant dialectal differences within Ngbaka, and it may be

mutually intelligible In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. It is sometimes used as an ...

with members of the Manza dialect cluster.

Phonology

Consonants

* The trill /r/ mainly occurs in ideophones, in both initial and final position. When it occurs in loanwords, it is often pronounced as a lateral * The glottal stop /ʔ/ mostly occurs before word-initial vowels. * Sounds /ŋ͡m, ʔ, h, w/, do not appear in intervocalic position. * /ŋ/ does not appear in word-initial position * The fricative /f/ can be pronounced in the western dialects as a voiceless stop * The voiceless stop /k/ can be pronounced as a voiced stop �in the western dialects.

Vowels

Writing system

Nasalisation is indicated with a tilde on the vowel : . Les tons des syllables sont indiqués avec des diacritiques lorsqu’il y a ambigüité : * the high tone is indicated with the

acute accent The acute accent (), , is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accent in the Latin and Greek alphabets, precomposed ch ...

: ; * the low tone is indicated with the

grave accent The grave accent () ( or ) is a diacritical mark used to varying degrees in French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan and many other western European languages as well as for a few unusual uses in English. It is also used in other lan ...

: ; * the following tones are not usually indicated in the spelling but may be indicated in some linguistic works : ** the medium tone with the vertical line above : ; ** the falling tone with the circumflex accent : ; ** the rising tone with the caron/hacek : .

References

External links

Ngbaka at Ghent University
{{Authority control Gbaya languages Languages of the Democratic Republic of the Congo