Languages of the Democratic Republic of the Congo
The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a multilingual country where an estimated total of 242 languages are spoken. The publication Ethnologue lists 215 living languages. The official language, since the colonial period, is French, one of the languages of Belgium. Four other languages, all of them Bantu based, have the status of national language: Kikongo-Kituba, Lingala, Swahili and Tshiluba. The DRC is a Francophone country, where, as of 2024, 55.393 million (50.69%) out of 109.276 million people speak French. In fact, 74% of the population use French as a lingua franca, showing that many speak it as a second or third language, even if they are not fully proficient. In 2024, there were over 12 million native French speakers, or around 12% of the population. When the country was a Belgian colony, it had already instituted teaching and use of the four national languages in primary schools, making it one of the few African nations to have had literacy in local languages during the European...
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