In many cases, abstract are formed from other words in Lingala. You can see that those three words have the prefix bo– and generally they don’t have a different plural form.

The word bolingo is derived from the word –ling– meaning to love. Therefore bolingo means is the quality of love. Similarly, the word bokonzi comes from one of our new vocabulary words: mokonzi, meaning chief or king. These two examples show us that abstract nouns are normally formed by simply replacing the prefix of the original word with the bo– prefix.

n the following table notice some other abstract nouns that can be formed:

Notice in the last two examples, the prefix bo– is put in front of the regular prefix mo-. This only happens occasionally in Lingala and is often done when the word is a shorter word in length.

Many other words can be formed in this way. Look out for others in the coming lessons.

Note: The word bomoi doesn’t have a word that is is derived from, but it does share the same abstract idea as life is not a physical thing we can point to.

Lingala (as is true of a number of African languages) makes changes not to the suffix – or end – of a word, but rather to the prefix – or start – of a word. Notice the following examples:

Notice the way the prefix changes to make the word plural. Though it may at first seem random and unrelated, there is a consistency in how most plural nouns are created in Lingala. The following table which breaks down these plural classes or groups:

There are a few variations of these combinations, but generally most fall into one of these categories.

When we take the numbers that we learned earlier, we can start to use these plural nouns along with plural verbs (when needed) to create new sentences. See how the numbers are placed after the noun, just as we do with adjectives: