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| Tshiluba | ||
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| Spoken in: | Democratic Republic of the Congo | |
| Region: | Kasai-Occidental and Kasai-Oriental provinces | |
| Total speakers: | 6,300,000 (1991) | |
| Language family: | Niger-Congo Atlantic-Congo Volta-Congo Benue-Congo Bantoid Southern Narrow Bantu Central L Luba Tshiluba |
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| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | lua | |
| ISO 639-3: | lua | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
Tshiluba (also called Luba-Kasai and Luba-Lulua) is a Bantu language spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where it is a national language.
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Classification
Tshiluba belongs to the Bantu branch of the Niger-Congo languages. It is the language of the Baluba people.
Geographic distribution
Tshiluba is spoken by about 6.3 million people in the Kasaï Occidental and Kasaï Oriental provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Dialects
There are significant dialect differences between the East Kasai Region (Luba people) and the West Kasai Region (Bena Lulua people).
Vocabulary
The Bantu word identified in June 2004 by Today's Translations, a British translation company, as the most untranslatable in the world: ilunga, in the Tshiluba tongue, means "a person ready to forgive any abuse the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time". However, it is more likely to be a personal name rather than a difficult word.
Sources
- MacIntyre, Ben. Why do Koreans say 'a biscuit would be nice' instead of 'I want a biscuit'?, The Times, August 21, 2004.
External links
- Online Cilubà - French Dictionary
- Ethnologue report on Tshiluba
- BBC News: Congo word "most untranslatable"
- PanAfrican L10n page on Luba
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