Lingala

lin / ln

🌍 General Information

ISO 639-3lin

ISO 639-1ln

French Namelingala

Glottocodeling1263

Language FamilyNiger–Congo

Writing SystemAfrican Reference Alphabet ( Latin ), Mandombe script

L1 Speakers21 million

L2 Speakers20 million

Population5500000 (10⁶+)

Endangermentsafe

CountriesRepublic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo

WikipediaLingala on Wikipedia

🗺️ Language Use

Data from CLEAR Global's Language Use Data Platform.

👥 Actors (4)

CLEAR Global (Ngo)

CLEAR Global's mission is to help people get information and be heard, whatever language they speak. Evolved from Translators without Borders (TWB), w...

Digital Umuganda (Startup)

Rwandan AI and open data company building voice infrastructure for African languages. "Umuganda" is the Rwandan tradition of community service -- Digi...

ML Collective (Ngo)

Non-profit research lab providing research opportunities to independent and underrepresented researchers. Runs multiple African language NLP projects ...

UBC Deep Learning & NLP Lab (University)

Research lab at the University of British Columbia led by Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, focused on deep representation learning and natural language socio-pr...

🤖 NLP & Tech Resources

✓ AfroLID

✓ Google Translate: 2022

✓ NLLB-200

✓ M2M-100

✓ Mozilla Common Voice: ☑️

✓ MADLAD-400 Docs: 3300 MAD-Docs

✓ MADLAD-400 Sentences: 139000 MAD-Sents

✓ Fineweb2: 💬

✓ FLEURS

✓ AfriNLLB

✓ MMS-ASR

✓ MMS-LID

✓ Omnilingual ASR

✓ SimbaBench

✓ WaxalNLP

Benchmarks

ASR (Speech-to-Text)

FLEURS-102 test

Model	CER	Source
facebook/mms-1b-fl102	4.3	reported

FLEURS-102 dev

Model	CER	Source
facebook/mms-1b-fl102	4.0	reported

PazaBench (aggregated)

Model	CER	WER	Source
facebook/omniASR-LLM-7B	4.0	11.0	reported
facebook/omniASR-LLM-7B-ZS	4.0	13.0	reported
facebook/omniASR-LLM-1B	5.0	13.0	reported
facebook/omniASR-LLM-3B	5.0	13.0	reported
facebook/omniASR-LLM-300M	6.0	16.0	reported
facebook/omniASR-CTC-7B	4.0	14.0	reported
facebook/omniASR-CTC-1B	5.0	17.0	reported
facebook/omniASR-CTC-3B	5.0	15.0	reported
facebook/omniASR-CTC-300M	7.0	24.0	reported
microsoft/paza-mms-1b-all	4.0	15.0	reported
facebook/mms-1b-all	4.0	15.0	reported
facebook/mms-1b-fl102	4.0	14.0	reported
microsoft/paza-Phi-4-multimodal-instruct	27.0	78.0	reported
nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3	35.0	85.0	reported
facebook/wav2vec2-conformer-rel-pos-large-960h-ft	36.0	110.0	reported
facebook/data2vec-audio-large-960h	37.0	95.0	reported
facebook/wav2vec2-conformer-rope-large-960h-ft	37.0	107.0	reported
facebook/hubert-large-ls960-ft	41.0	94.0	reported
facebook/hubert-xlarge-ls960-ft	42.0	95.0	reported
microsoft/paza-whisper-large-v3-turbo	47.0	83.0	reported
facebook/wav2vec2-large-960h-lv60-self	42.0	95.0	reported
facebook/data2vec-audio-base-960h	42.0	100.0	reported
facebook/wav2vec2-large-robust-ft-libri-960h	42.0	96.0	reported
nvidia/canary-qwen-2.5b	32.0	92.0	reported
facebook/wav2vec2-large-960h	50.0	100.0	reported
ibm/granite-speech-3.3-2b	37.0	94.0	reported
facebook/wav2vec2-base-960h	64.0	101.0	reported
openai/whisper-large-v3-turbo	70.0	93.0	reported
efficient-speech/lite-whisper-large-v3-turbo-acc	63.0	92.0	reported
distil-whisper/distil-large-v3	66.0	97.0	reported
ibm/granite-speech-3.3-8b	38.0	96.0	reported
openai/whisper-large	74.0	97.0	reported
distil-whisper/distil-medium.en	79.0	99.0	reported
openai/whisper-large-v3	77.0	98.0	reported
distil-whisper/distil-large-v2	73.0	99.0	reported
Qwen/Qwen2-Audio-7B-Instruct	56.0	103.0	reported
efficient-speech/lite-whisper-large-v3-acc	78.0	99.0	reported
openai/whisper-large-v2	75.0	98.0	reported
kyutai/stt-2.6b-en	62.0	113.0	reported
openai/whisper-medium.en	76.0	98.0	reported
openai/whisper-small.en	83.0	99.0	reported
efficient-speech/lite-whisper-large-v3	80.0	98.0	reported
openai/whisper-base.en	82.0	99.0	reported
efficient-speech/lite-whisper-large-v3-turbo	80.0	99.0	reported
efficient-speech/lite-whisper-large-v3-fast	81.0	99.0	reported
microsoft/Phi-4-multimodal-instruct	48.0	105.0	reported
openai/whisper-tiny.en	84.0	100.0	reported
nvidia/canary-1b-v2	47.0	113.0	reported
efficient-speech/lite-whisper-large-v3-turbo-fast	88.0	100.0	reported
usefulsensors/moonshine-base	114.0	130.0	reported
Qwen/Qwen2-Audio-7B	91.0	129.0	reported
usefulsensors/moonshine-tiny	262.0	403.0	reported

FLEURS

Model	WER	Source
openai/whisper-tiny	105.4	reported
openai/whisper-base	96.7	reported
openai/whisper-small	91.3	reported
openai/whisper-medium	83.2	reported
openai/whisper-large	76.8	reported
openai/whisper-large-v2	75.6	reported

TTS (Text-to-Speech)

SimbaBench (bibleTTS, Lingala)

Model	WER	UTMOS	PESQ	Source
UBC-NLP/Simba-TTS	35.97	3.92	1.51	reported

MT (Machine Translation)

FLORES-200

Model	direction	chrF	BLEU	Source
AfriqueQwen-14B	eng→lin	14.67	—	reported
AfriqueQwen-14B	lin→eng	28.44	—	reported
Qwen3-14B	eng→lin	15.09	—	reported
Qwen3-14B	lin→eng	27.63	—	reported
AfriqueGemma-12B	eng→lin	19.64	—	reported
AfriqueGemma-12B	lin→eng	29.77	—	reported
Gemma3-12B	eng→lin	14.16	—	reported
Gemma3-12B	lin→eng	10.96	—	reported
AfriqueLlama-8B	eng→lin	14.15	—	reported
AfriqueLlama-8B	lin→eng	26.94	—	reported
AfriNLLB 548M (Pruned Iterative FT)	fra→lin	44.97	15.88	reported
AfriNLLB 548M (Pruned Iterative FT)	lin→fra	43.39	20.06	reported
NLLB-600M	fra→lin	45.0	15.15	reported
NLLB-600M	lin→fra	43.07	19.85	reported
google/madlad400-3b-mt	lin→eng	27.4	5.7	reported
google/madlad400-3b-mt	eng→lin	18.1	2.1	reported
google/madlad400-7.2b-mt	lin→eng	27.2	5.8	reported
google/madlad400-7.2b-mt	eng→lin	18.8	2.3	reported
google/madlad400-10.7b-mt	lin→eng	29.5	6.8	reported
google/madlad400-10.7b-mt	eng→lin	20.8	2.7	reported
google/madlad400-8b-lm	lin→eng	29.9	6.8	reported
google/madlad400-8b-lm	eng→lin	10.6	0.2	reported

BOUQuET

Model	direction	chrF++	Source
OMT-LLaMA 8B	eng→lin	?	reported
OMT-LLaMA 8B	lin→eng	?	reported

FLORES+ 10-sample

Model	direction	SpBLEU	ChrF	Source
baidu/ernie-4.5-300b-a47b	eng→lin	22.2	53.8	reported
baidu/ernie-4.5-300b-a47b	lin→eng	10.2	36.7	reported
google/gemini-2.5-pro	lin→eng	18.7	48.2	reported
google/gemini-2.5-pro	eng→lin	19.9	51.6	reported
google/gemini-3-pro-preview	lin→eng	23.7	52.0	reported
google/gemini-3-pro-preview	eng→lin	24.3	58.0	reported
google/translate-v2	lin→eng	27.4	52.2	reported
google/translate-v2	eng→lin	23.7	52.3	reported

LLM (Large Language Models)

FLORES-200

Model	Log-perplexity	Source
goldfish-models/lin_latn_full	106.45	reported

AfroBench

Model	Intent	Topic	Source
AfriqueQwen-14B	41.38	61.41	reported
Qwen3-14B	46.44	63.74	reported
AfriqueGemma-12B	44.47	51.73	reported
Gemma3-12B	53.41	64.38	reported
AfriqueLlama-8B	38.78	41.85	reported

AfroBench-Lite

Model	Avg Score	Source
CohereForAI/aya-101	35.2	reported
google/gemma-1.1-7b-it	24.7	reported
meta-llama/Llama-2-7b	16.1	reported
meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3-8B	16.6	reported
meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-8B	18.8	reported
MaLA-LM/LLaMAX3-8B	16.4	reported
google/gemma-2-9b	30.1	reported
google/gemma-2-27b	32.5	reported
meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-70B	30.0	reported
AfroLLaMa 8B	15.0	reported
Gemini 1.5 Pro	52.3	reported
GPT-4o	58.4	reported
google/gemma-3-27b-it	35.9	reported
Gemini 2.0 Flash	57.5	reported
GPT-4.1	59.9	reported
meta-llama/Llama-4-Scout-17B-16E	45.0	reported
Lugha-Llama 8B	17.9	reported
Claude 4.0 Sonnet	62.9	reported
Claude 3.7 Sonnet	55.0	reported
Claude 4.5 Sonnet	63.3	reported
Gemini 2.5 Flash	60.9	reported
Gemini 2.5 Pro	68.4	reported
GPT-5	76.8	reported
Gemini 3 Pro	68.8	reported

AfriMGSM(Math)

Model	Accuracy	Source
Aya-101	4.4	reported
Gemma 2 27B	18.0	reported
LLaMa 3.1 70B	11.2	reported
GPT-4o	51.2	reported

AfriXNLI

Model	Accuracy	Source
Aya-101	33.5	reported
Gemma 2 27B	32.0	reported
LLaMa 3.1 70B	32.8	reported
GPT-4o	32.7	reported

AfriMMLU

Model	AfriMMLU-ElemMath	AfriMMLU-GlobalFacts	AfriMMLU-Geography	AfriMMLU-MicroEcon	AfriMMLU-IntLaw	Source
GPT-4o	71.0	54.0	55.0	63.0	76.0	reported

SIB-200 10-sample

Model	Classification Acc.	Source
deepseek/deepseek-v3.2-exp	100.0	reported
meta-llama/llama-3.1-70b-instruct	100.0	reported
mistralai/mistral-saba	100.0	reported

📝 Notes

Observations

Major lingua franca in western DRC and Republic of Congo

ASR Models (33)

Model	Size	Downloads	Likes
openai/whisper-large-v3-turbo	0.8B	6.5M	2.9K
openai/whisper-large-v3	2B	4.8M	5.6K
facebook/mms-1b-all	1.0B	2.0M	195
openai/whisper-small	—	1.9M	547
openai/whisper-base	—	1.7M	264
Systran/faster-whisper-tiny	—	1.2M	19
openai/whisper-tiny	—	761.0K	424
Systran/faster-whisper-large-v3	—	741.0K	556
openai/whisper-medium	—	550.0K	283
Systran/faster-whisper-small	—	416.0K	29
Systran/faster-whisper-large-v2	—	138.0K	43
deepdml/faster-whisper-large-v3-turbo-ct2	—	90.4K	195
openai/whisper-large	2B	84.8K	542
openai/whisper-large-v2	2B	69.5K	1.8K
guillaumekln/faster-whisper-large-v2	—	24.9K	211
xkeyC/whisper-large-v3-turbo-gguf	0.8B	17.2K	31
guillaumekln/faster-whisper-tiny	—	16.3K	9
guillaumekln/faster-whisper-base	—	5.7K	10
guillaumekln/faster-whisper-small	—	1.4K	28
neurlang/ipa-whisper-base	72.6M	683	23

View on HuggingFace: ln: 30 | lin: 3

TTS Models (27)

Model	Size	Downloads	Likes
k2-fsa/OmniVoice	—	606.0K	577
drbaph/OmniVoice-bf16	—	4.7K	13
WueNLP/seamless-m4t-v2-large-speech-encoder	—	1.7K	9
splendor1811/omnivoice-vietnamese	0.6B	672	2
gluschenko/omnivoice-onnx	—	397	4
edwixx/OmniVoice	—	163	0
WANJIAX2197/OmniVoice	—	30	0
Bgeorge/OmniVoice	—	25	1
yash3120/OmniVoice	—	25	0
ex510/OmniVoice	—	19	0
razi08/OmniVoice	—	17	0
Manish993135/OmniVoice	—	16	0
riasatsk/OmniVoice	—	16	0
harsha7286/OmniVoice	—	15	0
lopho/OmniVoice	—	15	0
bilalRHCH/Arabic-text-to-speech	—	14	0
phucpx247/OmniVoice	—	14	0
gubernac/OmniVoice	—	13	1
preference1/OmniVoice	—	13	0
EBINSHAJI1999/OmniVoice	—	12	0

View on HuggingFace: ln: 27

MT Models (36)

Model	Size	Downloads	Likes
facebook/nllb-200-distilled-600M	—	1.1M	880
google/madlad400-3b-mt	3B	329.0K	192
facebook/nllb-200-distilled-1.3B	—	147.0K	181
facebook/nllb-200-3.3B	—	81.6K	443
Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-mul-en	—	61.6K	89
facebook/nllb-200-1.3B	—	31.4K	71
Xenova/nllb-200-distilled-600M	—	4.4K	50
alirezamsh/small100	0.3B	3.9K	104
Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-en-mul	—	3.3K	28
mradermacher/OmniTranslate-1.0-GGUF	0.6B	1.1K	3
mradermacher/OmniTranslate-1.1-GGUF	0.6B	1.1K	2
facebook/nllb-moe-54b	—	557	123
MihaiPopa-1/OmniTranslate-1.1	0.6B	393	0
MihaiPopa-1/OmniTranslate-1.0	0.6B	374	0
Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-ln-en	—	46	0
Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-ln-de	—	45	0
Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-en-nic	—	42	0
Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-nic-en	—	41	0
Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-sv-ln	—	41	0
Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-fi-ln	—	40	0

View on HuggingFace: ln: 30 | lin: 6

LLM Models (36)

Model	Size	Downloads	Likes
bigscience/bloomz-560m	0.6B	1.0M	137
bigscience/bloom-560m	0.6B	164.0K	371
bigscience/bloom-1b7	2B	49.4K	122
bigscience/bloom-3b	3B	14.1K	94
bigscience/bloomz-3b	3B	13.3K	81
bigscience/bloom-7b1	7B	10.4K	202
bigscience/bloom-1b1	1B	7.0K	66
bigscience/bloom	176B	5.9K	5.0K
bigscience/bloomz-7b1	7B	4.2K	147
bigscience/bloomz-7b1-mt	7B	4.1K	144
bigscience/bloom-7b1-intermediate	7B	3.7K	0
bigscience/bloomz-7b1-p3	7B	3.5K	6
bigscience/bloomz	176B	3.5K	513
bigscience/bloom-1b1-intermediate	1B	3.4K	0
bigscience/bloomz-mt	176B	3.3K	32
bigscience/bloomz-1b1	1B	2.9K	33
bigscience/bloomz-1b7	2B	2.8K	23
UBC-NLP/toucan-base	0.6B	2.5K	5
bigscience/bloom-1b7-intermediate	2B	2.4K	0
bigscience/bloom-560m-intermediate	0.6B	2.2K	1

View on HuggingFace: ln: 30 | lin: 6

Datasets

ASR Datasets (37)

Dataset	Rows	Downloads	Likes
google/fleurs	—	46.3K	392
google/WaxalNLP	2.6M	12.3K	219
sarulab-speech/yodas2_sidon	1.5M	6.0K	60
claudefitz/WaxalNLP	2.6M	3.6K	0
google/xtreme_s	—	3.2K	70
BolajiJsAI/WaxalNLP	2.6M	2.5K	1
ngoloan/WaxalNLP	2.0M	2.1K	0
novelwolde36/WaxalNLP	2.5M	2.0K	1
Phsntom/WaxalNLP	2.6M	1.9K	0
Ephraimmm/WaxalNLPr	2.6M	1.8K	0
fiifinketia/WaxalNLP	2.5M	1.7K	1
zoelaenskii/zinny	2.6M	1.4K	1
0xzanuee/WaxalNLP	1.9M	1.4K	0
suryatmodulus/yodas2_sidon	—	1.1K	0
UBC-NLP/SimbaBench_dataset	748.0K	975	0
WueNLP/belebele-fleurs	65.1K	799	9
satwikguptha/xtreme_s	—	364	0
nanexxx/fleurs	—	313	0
WueNLP/sib-fleurs	94.4K	260	11
bdallhrajh371/WaxalNLP	2.6M	250	0

View on HuggingFace: lin: 27 | ln: 10

TTS Datasets (20)

Dataset	Rows	Downloads	Likes
google/WaxalNLP	2.6M	12.3K	219
sarulab-speech/yodas2_sidon	1.5M	6.0K	60
claudefitz/WaxalNLP	2.6M	3.6K	0
BolajiJsAI/WaxalNLP	2.6M	2.5K	1
ngoloan/WaxalNLP	2.0M	2.1K	0
novelwolde36/WaxalNLP	2.5M	2.0K	1
Phsntom/WaxalNLP	2.6M	1.9K	0
Ephraimmm/WaxalNLPr	2.6M	1.8K	0
fiifinketia/WaxalNLP	2.5M	1.7K	1
zoelaenskii/zinny	2.6M	1.4K	1
0xzanuee/WaxalNLP	1.9M	1.4K	0
suryatmodulus/yodas2_sidon	—	1.1K	0
UBC-NLP/SimbaBench_dataset	748.0K	975	0
WueNLP/belebele-fleurs	65.1K	799	9
WueNLP/sib-fleurs	94.4K	260	11
bdallhrajh371/WaxalNLP	2.6M	250	0
YuRiVeRTi/V1Q	186.0K	201	3
OlameMend/soreva	—	40	7
lenoxaugo254/LenoxAI	—	10	1
dijihax/Dataset	—	8	2

View on HuggingFace: lin: 13 | ln: 7

Translation Datasets (50)

Dataset	Rows	Downloads	Likes
HuggingFaceFW/finetranslations	—	75.8K	283
facebook/flores	—	43.4K	97
openlanguagedata/flores_plus	893.0K	15.8K	124
gtak1/panlex-meanings	64.1M	6.3K	0
google/smol	798.0K	2.8K	94
Muennighoff/flores200	—	1.6K	20
gsarti/flores_101	207.0K	1.6K	32
facebook/bouquet	5.6M	1.6K	33
ayymen/Pontoon-Translations	3.6M	1.1K	18
HuggingFaceFW/finetranslations-edu	109.0M	1.1K	27
Helsinki-NLP/tatoeba	—	866	56
ayymen/Weblate-Translations	11.7M	383	18
Helsinki-NLP/opus_ubuntu	37.4K	354	4
mteb/FloresBitextMining	2.0K	303	1
visheratin/laion-coco-nllb	894.0K	255	44
cointegrated/panlex-meanings	157.0M	255	13
YuRiVeRTi/V1Q	186.0K	201	3
ymoslem/Tatoeba-Translations	8.6M	192	5
slone/nllb-200-10M-sample	10.0M	168	13
bible-nlp/biblenlp-corpus	—	164	37

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