Lomongo Alphabet

The Lomongo language is written in the Latin alphabet with two letters English does not have: Ɛ ɛ (open e) and Ɔ ɔ (open o). They are full letters with their own capitals, not accented versions of e and o, and they sort right after them: a, e, ɛ, i, o, ɔ, u. The language's own name shows them off: Lɔmɔngɔ, the speech of the Mɔngɔ people.

Lomongo has seven vowels, and the pairs e/ɛ and o/ɔ are different sounds that tell words apart. e and o are close, like the vowels of French été and beau; ɛ is open, like the e of English bed, and ɔ is open like the aw of British law. Writing ɛ as e or ɔ as o, as people often do on a phone without the right keyboard, spells a different vowel.

Consonants use ordinary Latin letters, and many Lomongo words begin with a nasal joined to the next consonant: mb, mp, nd, ng, nk, ns, as in the name of the Nkundo, and ny for the sound of Spanish ñ. These are typed as two plain letters, so the grid lists only the vowels and the marks that need special characters.

Tone marks in Lomongo

Like most Bantu languages, Lomongo is tonal: whether a syllable is said high or low can change the word or the grammar. Dictionaries, grammars and teaching books mark a high tone with an acute accent over the vowel (á, é, í, ó, ú) and leave low tone unmarked. Everyday writing, from letters to text messages, usually leaves tone out and lets the reader's ear fill it in.

Unicode has ready-made á, é, í, ó and ú, but not ɛ or ɔ with an accent. For those, type the letter and then the combining acute accent (U+0301), and the two show as one: ɛ́, ɔ́. Copy the mark from the grid and paste it straight after the vowel.

How to type ɛ and ɔ on a keyboard and phone

The quickest way on any device is to copy the letters from this page. For regular writing, install a keyboard layout made for Congolese languages: a Lingala layout already has ɛ and ɔ, and the free Keyman app from SIL offers African Latin-script keyboards for Windows, Mac, Android and iPhone.

On Windows, in Microsoft Word or WordPad type the code and press Alt+X: 025B gives ɛ and 0190 Ɛ, 0254 gives ɔ and 0186 Ɔ, and 0301 adds the high-tone accent to the letter before it. The accented plain vowels have classic Alt codes on the number pad: Alt+0225 á, Alt+0233 é, Alt+0237 í, Alt+0243 ó, Alt+0250 ú. On a Mac, Option+E followed by the vowel gives á é í ó ú, and the Character Viewer (Control+Command+Space) finds open e and open o.

In HTML, write ɛ for ɛ, Ɛ for Ɛ, ɔ for ɔ and Ɔ for Ɔ. Watch the look-alikes: ɛ is not the Greek epsilon ε, and Ɔ is not a reversed C (Ↄ); they look close in some fonts but are different characters that search engines and spell-checkers will not match.

Where the Mongo language is spoken

Mongo, or Lomongo, is a Bantu language of the Democratic Republic of the Congo 🇨🇩, spoken in the equatorial rainforest inside the great bend of the Congo River, in Équateur and Tshuapa provinces, from Mbandaka on the Congo to Boende on the Tshuapa and beyond. CLDR estimates about 700,000 speakers; the language is a cluster of related dialects, and the Nkundo variety around Mbandaka, also called Lonkundo, is among the best documented in writing. Linguists class it as C61 in Guthrie's zones of the Bantu languages.

Many Mongo speakers also use Lingala, the language of Kinshasa, the river and Congolese music, and French, the official language of school and government. Money is the Congolese franc (CDF), whose symbol is FC. For the letters of the DRC's other languages see the Lingala, Kongo, Luba-Lulua, Luba-Katanga and Swahili collections, and for the flag and the country's emoji see DR Congo.

Searching for "Mongo language" often turns up MongoDB and its query language. This page is about the language of the Mongo people of Congo, not the database.

Hulstaert, the Lianja epic and Lomongo in writing

Lomongo owes much of its written standard to Gustaaf Hulstaert, a Belgian Catholic missionary of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart who spent his working life near Mbandaka, wrote a grammar and a large dictionary of the language, and argued for teaching children in Lomongo rather than in a language from elsewhere. With Edmond Boelaert he founded the journal Aequatoria, devoted to the languages and cultures of the equatorial region 📖.

Boelaert published a 1949 compilation of the Mongo people's great oral epic, Nsong'a Lianja, the story of the hero Lianja and his sister Nsongo; the apostrophe in the title marks a dropped vowel. Around it lives a whole forest world: the leopard 🐆, a chiefly emblem across Central Africa, dugout canoes 🛶 and fishing 🐟 on the Ruki, Tshuapa and Lomela rivers, drums 🥁 for dance and messages, and Salonga National Park 🏞️🌳🐘, Africa's largest rainforest national park and one of the last homes of the bonobo, which lives only south of the Congo River.