The use of the narrative final vowel -á by the Lingala-speaking youth of Kinshasa: from anterior to near/recent past

Abstract

Abstract The aim of this paper is to try to understand why young people in Kinshasa prefer the construction with a subject marker, the verbal base, and the suffix -á (SM-VB-á) to the recent past. After looking at the narrative tense in some local languages, we first look at how this SM-VB-á tense is described for Standard Lingala, before examining its use in the Lingala youth language of Kinshasa. Finally, we investigate whether there are any manipulations at the morphosyntactic level. Without excluding the possibility of a natural shift or substrate interference, it can be postulated that a probable source of this is the French simple past with the suffix -a. The same scenario has been demonstrated with -é in the infinitive and in the perfect/recent tense with all verbs borrowed from French.