Aspects of Multilingualism in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Abstract

[Abstract] The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a multilingual country where 214 native languages (Ethnologue) are spoken among circa 68 million inhabitants (2008). The situations derived from the practice of a multilingual mode of communication have had important linguistic effects on the languages in contact. Those have been particularly crucial in the rural areas, where the relations between the individual speakers of different micro linguistic groups have contributed to varied degrees of modification of the grammatical code of the languages. The contact that resulted from migratory movements could also explain why some linguistic features (i.e. logophoricity, Güldemann 2003) are shared by genetically diverse languages spoken across a large macro-area. The coexistence of such a large number of languages in the DRC has important cultural, economical, sanitary and political effects on the life of the Congolese people, who could be cruc ially affected by the decisions on language policy taken by the Administration.