Involvement in language: the role of the Congregatio Immaculati Cordis Mariae in the history of Lingala.(Report)

The missionaries of Scbeut (Congregatio Immaculati Cordis Mariae) played an important role in the history of the Congolese language Lingala. The linguistic policies and practices they developed not only bad a serious impact on the language's geographical spread and range of sociocultural functions but also involved an extensive "reworking" of the grammar and lexicon and led to the first appearance of the glossonym Lingala. In some parts of the colony, the language-reform program met with considerable success. In other parts, resistance and subaltern defiance took the language in other directions than originally intended.

Keywords: the Belgian Congo; Fathers of Scheut; language; mission

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It is well known that missionaries have been instrumental in initiating and developing the study of African languages. (1) Much of the present-day knowledge in African linguistics stems from work published by Protestant and Catholic missionaries beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century. The task of conversion not only compelled missionaries to acquire a personal knowledge of the indigenous languages but also to compile word lists of these languages and describe their grammatical rules. These texts allowed subsequent generations of missionaries to better prepare themselves prior to departure from their home countries and to begin the translation of the Scriptures and other religious texts.

Studies in the history of language sciences have also amply demonstrated how this "missionary involvement in linguistics," as Fabian called it, (2) was intricately linked to what can be termed an involvement in language. Missionaries often moved beyond the mere production of reliable sources on newly encountered languages. Whether by accident or design, their ways of dealing and working with language also have had important, lingering effects on African-language structures and African ethnolinguistic landscapes. (3) Missionaries played a major part, for instance, in the first efforts to write and standardize African languages. These processes "stabilized" and thus "rendered controllable" the variable reality of speech. They also mediated the taxonomic organization of Africa into discrete geolinguistic and ethnolinguistic entities, in ways that "made sense" of the continent to the European powers. (4) Moreover, the use of a standardized language in the mission-run school networks and printing facilities strongly affected the range of its social and cultural functions. An ideology of literacy was introduced, shaping new hierarchical relations between the "standard" version of a language and "dialects." In these ways, nineteenth-and twentieth-century missionary involvement in language must be recognized as key to African linguistic histories and ecologies.

The following account details one such case, namely that of the missionaries of the Belgian Congregatio Immaculati Cordis Mariae, better known as the Missionaries of Scheut or the Scheutists, (5) and their involvement in the history of Lingala in the Belgian Congo since 1888. Today, Lingala is a Bantu language spoken in the northern and western sections of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (where approximately 212 languages are spoken), including in its capital Kinshasa. It is also spoken in the northern half of the neighboring Republic of the Congo and within the large community of Congolese emigres across Africa and the Western world. (6) Lingala is the native language of approximately 15 million speakers, while another 10 million, who mostly inhabit rural areas or live in the diaspora, use it regularly as a lingua franca. This situation is partly the result of the Scheutists' active promotion of Lingala in the Belgian Congo throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Starting ca. 1901, the Scheutists embarked on a massive project of language reform, actively and consciously intervening in vocabulary and grammar. The role of the Scheutists in Lingala's evolution has been previously addressed in scholarly literature, but always in the margins of discussions either of the congregation or of Lingala, and in a fragmentary manner. (7) In addition, some of the earliest publications and key archival documents have become available only recently, or were written in Flemish, and therefore continue to escape the attention of international students of the subject. (8) I intend to present a more unified account, demonstrating with these newly available sources that three important phases of linguistic work preceded and prepared the ground for the Scheutists' project of language reform, each of which involved languages other than Lingala. In the first phase (1888-89), the Scheutists planned to develop their missionary work around a variety of Bobangi, which had been affected by cross-linguistic influences in precolonial times. In the second phase (1889-91), they oriented toward the less prevalent language Iboko, and in the third (1891-1900), they experimented with the original Bobangi language.The fourth phase, then, combined the experiences gained with these three languages into the project of language reform, which included the coinage of the glossonym Lingala.

Equally lacking in the existing literature is any discussion of resistance to the Scheutists' project, which occurred among the African subjects targeted to assimilate the newly forged language as well as among Scheutists themselves. The colonized subjects did not always embrace the language form the Scheutists imposed on them, modifying it in some cases to fit their own purposes. The inhabitants of the capital Leopoldville, for instance, developed subaltern speech patterns that took the language in different directions, leaving the architected language to formal settings such as schools, the media, and the liturgy Rebellion was not centered solely in the Congolese communities; the Scheutists counted within their own ranks a number of opponents who challenged their confreres' plans to spread and generalize a constructed language. (9) To be sure, these opposing voices fought a rearguard action, never altering the congregation's overall policy in any fundamental way. However, they deserve to be mentioned, as their arguments drew inspiration from the situation in the capital, where another language, Kikongo, threatened Lingala's dominance.