Language

Although there are hundreds of local languages and dialects spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the linguistic variety is bridged both by the use of ethnically neutral French and the country's official languages: Kongo, Tshiluba, Swahili and Lingala.

During the DRC's time as a Belgian colony, the four national languages were used in primary schools, making it one of the few countries to have had literacy in local languages during the occupation by Europeans.