Lingala is a Bantu language spoken throughout the northwestern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and a large part of the Republic of the Congo, as well as to some degree in Angola and the Central African Republic. It has over 10 million speakers.

In the 19th century, before the creation of the Congo Free State, the Bangala, or 'river people', were a group of similar Bantu peoples living and trading along the bend of the Congo River, from Irebu at the mouth of the Ubangi River to the Mongala River. The spoke similar languages such as Losengo natively, but the trade language used by the Bangala was Bangi (Bobangi), the most prestigious language downstream, spoken natively between Stanley Pool (Kinshasa) and Irebu, and people upstream of the Bangala took Bangi to be the Bangala language, as did European missionaries.

In the last two decades of the 19th century, after the forces of Leopold II of Belgium conquered the region and opened it to commercial exploitation, trade Bangi came into wider use. The colonial administration, in need of a common language for the region, started to use the language for administrative purposes. The language had already simplified somewhat compared to local Bantu languages, in its sentence structure, word structure and sounds were simplified, and speakers borrowed words and constructs liberally from other languages. However, the fact that speakers had very similar native languages prevented Lingala from becoming a pidgin along the lines of Kituba.