WikiLinguila
WikiLinguila Community User Group or WikiLinguila (Wikimedia for minority Languages of central Africa) is a user group dedicated to the promotion of Wikimedia projects in the Bantu languages of the central African region, with Kikongo and Lingala as models. The two Bantu languages are spoken in the central part of Africa, with around 26 million native speakers (Lingala 20 million - Kikongo 6 million) and countless scattered speakers forming a group of dialects in three countries of the central region as national languages, namely: Congo-Kinshasa, Congo-Brazzaville and Angola, as well as a very small minority in the south of the Central African Republic, Gabon and South Sudan.
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| Location | Central Africa : Congo-Kinshasa  Congo-Brazzaville  Angola  |
| Official language(s) | Lingala, Kongo |
| Other language(s) | Teke, Luba-Kasai, Swahili, Tetela, Luba-Katanga, Kituba, Bangi, Hunde |
| Website | wikilinguila.org |
Langila is Lingala derived in its slang form, a language spoken by those who know each other, and by default is used to designate all kinds of languages spoken in the world, hence WikiLangila as a language Wiki or Linguila as a linguistic Wiki as a community of linguists and speakers of Central African languages.
The initiative encourages and helps train the rest of the Central African communities, where the movement is still inactive and there are as yet no affiliates. The aim is to contribute content to Wikimedia projects. In principle, it would be fine to have separate usergroups, for example, Lingala Wikimedians User Group and Kikongo Wikimedians User Group, but uniting these closely related languages spoken in a very specific region of the continent would be very constructive. As for the téké and Luba-kasaï languages spoken respectively in Central Africa, in the Republic of Congo, in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Gabon for the téké languages, and for Luba-kasaï in the south of the Democratic Republic of Congo and in the north of Angola, we plan to make gradual progress.
The big difficulty at the moment is finding Wikimedian contributors in these regions, or who are interested in taking part in the project. We're appealing to anyone from or living in these different regions to help the world discover our languages, which tend to be forgotten. Many young speakers may not be aware of the importance of contributing to the content of local languages, and may not have the necessary skills to do so effectively.
WikiLinguila aims to increase the visibility and develop digital content of national languages for countries in the Central African region, a good way of preserving at the same time the cultural heritage of minority peoples through Wikipedia projects and other structures working to make their culture accessible on the Internet. Our main mission is to enhance, promote and give visibility to content developed in our national languages, to make this project our own, because it helps us assert our identity as people and speakers of the Central African region. In so doing, we're confirming that, together, the world is becoming a smaller place in which to communicate and do lots of constructive things.
Membership
editGroup membership is open to all interested parties.
Designated contacts
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Affiliations Committee Resolutions
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