I wanted to improve my Lingala. Not through textbooks or grammar drills — through something that actually felt good to use. Something playful. Something that respected the language without making it feel like homework.
I'd seen culturally specific language games like Gbamu, a Yoruba card game, and it made something click. Lingala deserved tools that felt just as intentional — not generic, not clinical, but built with the culture in mind.
My dad and family helped with the words. We went back and forth on the phrases, the proverbs, what sounded right, what people actually say. A linguistics professor also reviewed the content for accuracy. For translation, I've been working with Daraja, a platform built specifically for African languages, because Lingala deserved more than being an afterthought inside a tool built for fifty other languages first. That process alone taught me more than I expected.
"People said it felt like something they'd been waiting for."
Diaspora people especially — second and third generation, people who grew up hearing Lingala at home but never quite got it. People who wanted to speak to their parents or grandparents in their own language but didn't know where to start. That response changed what this is.
It's for the person who grew up hearing Lingala spoken around them but never quite had the space to learn it properly. The adult child who wants to call their parent in their language. The second-generation kid who feels caught between cultures and wants a way back in.
It's for the person who married into the culture and wants to meet their family halfway. For the parent who doesn't speak it fluently but wants their kids to learn — and wants to learn alongside them.
And it's for anyone curious about Central African language and culture — because language is always the door.
The language of Congolese music that has shaped African and global pop culture for decades. The language of family conversations, of church, of the market, of home. And yet there is almost nothing built for diaspora learners. Language loss is quiet and gradual — it happens one generation at a time. Loba Lingala is a small but deliberate attempt to interrupt that pattern.
Every general-purpose AI model treats Lingala the same way it treats fifty other languages it barely knows, close enough to pass, never quite right. I wasn't building something close enough. So I went a different way: my dad checking every phrase, a linguistics professor catching what even he might miss, and a translation partner, Daraja, built specifically for African languages instead of guessing at one from a training set built for everything else.
None of that was the fast way to build this. It was the only way I'd have actually trusted it.
Proverbs are not vocabulary. They carry worldview, values, and ways of understanding life that don't translate directly into English or French. They are among the most vulnerable parts of a language — passed down orally, rarely written, and easily lost when a generation doesn't pass them on.
The proverbs in Loba Lingala were not pulled from a database. They were sourced through conversations — with family, elders, and community members across the diaspora. That is preservation work. Not archiving for its own sake, but making living cultural knowledge accessible, enjoyable, and worth passing on.
"The website looks really well put together and it's a great learning tool"
"As a software developer, I can honestly say it's very well done"
"Wowwww! I don't think there's anything like it yet"
"As someone who doesn't speak Lingala, this is sick!"
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