mermaid, literally mammy/water búku for book mótuka, from motor-car, for car Variation The Lingala language can be divided into several regiolects and sociolects. The major regional varieties are northwestern Lingala, Kinshasa Lingala and Brazzaville Lingala. Literary Lingala (lingala littéraire or lingala classique in French) is a standardized form mostly used in education and news broadcasts on state-owned radio or television, in religious services in the Roman Catholic Church and is the language taught as a subject at some educational levels. It is historically associated with the work of the Catholic Church, the Belgian CICM missionaries in particular. It has a seven-vowel system () with an obligatory tense-lax vowel harmony. It also has a full range of morphological noun prefixes with mandatory grammatical agreement system with subject–verb, or noun–modifier for each of class. It is largely used in formal functions and in some forms of writing. Most native speakers of Spoken Lingala and Kinshasa Lingala consider it not to be comprehensible. Northwestern (or Equateur) Lingala is the product of the (incomplete) internalization by Congolese of the prescriptive rules the CICM missionaries intended when designing Literary Lingala. The northwest is a zone where the CICM missionaries strongly supported the network of schools. Spoken Lingala (called lingala parlé in French) is the variety mostly used in the day-to-day lives of Lingalaphones. It has a full morphological noun prefix system, but the agreement system in the noun phrase is more lax than the in the literary variety. Regarding phonology, there is a five-vowel system and there is no vowel harmony. Spoken Lingala is largely used in informal functions, and the majority of Lingala songs use spoken Lingala over other variations. Modern spoken Lingala is influenced by French; French verbs, for example, may be "lingalized" adding Lingala inflection prefixes and suffixes: "acomprenaki te" or "acomprendraki te" (he did not understand, using the French word comprendre) instead of classic Lingala "asímbaki ntína te" (literally: s/he grasped/held the root/cause not). These French influences are more prevalent in Kinshasa and are indicative of an erosion of the language as education, in French, becomes accessible to more of the population. There are pronunciation differences between "Catholic Lingala" and "Protestant Lingala" - for example: nzala/njala (hunger). Lingala ya Bayankee (sometimes labeled Yanké) is a widely used sociolect in Kinshasa, e.g., by street youth, street vendors, criminal gangs and homeless children. Langila is a little-studied language game (or ludic practice) initially