Kikongo as Prototype Language: Linguistic Sovereignty Against Colonial Lexicography

Abstract

This article advances a provocative thesis: Kikongo can be modelled as a prototype language whose phonological richness, noun class system and onomatopoeic logic provide a template from which later, more degraded systems diverge. Rather than a mystical claim, I treat this as a working hypothesis for decolonial linguistics.

First, I review missionary grammars and dictionaries, showing how colonial lexicography systematically fragmented Kikongo’s internal logic to make it legible to European categories.

Second, I use a set of formal features – tonal patterns, nasalisation, consonant–vowel symmetry – to compare Kikongo with selected Bantu, Afroasiatic and Indo-European languages.

 Third, I link these linguistic observations to political epistemology: if Kikongo encodes a classification of reality that is more densely structured than the languages of empire, then policy conducted exclusively in French or English necessarily discards part of our cognitive capacity.

The article dialogues directly with the contributions on Mandombe and symbolic sovereignty, showing how Kikongo’s structure maps naturally to Mandombe’s geometry.

It concludes with concrete proposals for using Kikongo as the base language in regional legal drafting and scientific terminology. I do not place Kikongo as "better than" or "superior to" than other african languages. It is an example of linguistic sovereignty that can be replicated with other languages.