| Lingala | English |
|---|---|
| nazali | I am |
| ozali | you are (singular) |
| azali | he/she is |
From the above three words, you can see that Lingala works very differently to English in its word structure. In English we might expect that the start of the word would remain the same, whereas we can see that in Lingala the start, or prefix, of a word changes depending on who is doing the action of the verb.
In the words above we can see what the verb is by looking for the root of the verb. In the words above that root is
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zala. This is in effect the ‘word’ that we are here learning.
You can also see that the word azali can mean both he is and she is. Lingala does not have a feminine or masculine structure to words. We will learn more about this in a later lesson.
| Lingala | English |
|---|---|
| ezali | it is |
| tozali | we are |
| bozali | you are (plural) |
| bazali | they are (people) |
| ezali | they are (objects) |
We have now listed five other prefixes that help us identify the subject of the verb. You can see that tozali , bozali and bazali are plural versions of the verb
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zala. Interestingly, in Lingala there is a difference between you as a singular and you as a plural. This can be a little confusing for English speakers when learning Lingala, but you will find it helps be more specific when speaking in Lingala.
Now notice that ezali appears twice, both as a singular and a plural form when referring to an inanimate item, such as a box or tool. This is the opposite of what we find with it in English where we also use the word them to refer to more than one inanimate item.
Note: In older Lingala (something we will discuss in another article) an inanimate plural is izali. This is rarely used by modern Lingala speakers.
So, the complete list of prefixes used by lingala is as follows:
| Singular | Plural | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| na- | I | to- | we |
| o– | you (singular) | bo- | you (plural) |
| a- | he/she | ba- | they (people) |
| e- | it is | e- | they (objects) |