Bibiliya E Santu Libinza — Libinza Scripture Portions (DR Congo)
Overview
Bibiliya E Santu Libinza ("the Holy Bible in Libinza") is the Gospel of Luke in the Libinza language of Équateur Province, DRC, published by Beyond Translation under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license and available via YouVersion/Bible.com (ID 4321; abbreviation: LIZ). This is the first scripture translation into Libinza, produced as part of Beyond Translation's DRC Church-Centric Bible Translation initiative in which local church communities trained as translators received ownership of the text.
Language and People
Libinza (ISO 639-3: liz; also called Libinza-Ngiri or Lobinza) is a Bantu language: Niger-Congo → Atlantic-Congo → Benue-Congo → Bantoid → Narrow Bantu → Zone C, C.32 (Bangi-Ntomba group). It is closely related to Lingala's substrate languages and to other languages of the Ngiri River island communities.
The Libinza people inhabit the islands and floodplains of the Ngiri River — a left-bank tributary of the Congo River in the Ingende Territory, Équateur Province, northwestern DRC. This area lies in the vast Congo River basin flooded plain between the Congo and Ubangi rivers.
Estimated speakers: approximately 34,000 (SIL/Ethnologue estimates).
Cultural Context
The Ngiri River communities are known for their fishing culture and their distinctive canoe-building traditions. The area is ecologically characterized by permanent and seasonal floodplains; communities live on elevated river islands and move with the seasonal flood cycles. The Ngiri languages form a cluster of closely related but distinct speech varieties that developed in relative isolation on river islands.
Publishing and Organizations
Published by Beyond Translation (beyondtranslation.org, Arlington, Texas) under the CC-BY-SA 4.0 license, as part of their DRC 15-language community translation initiative.