Things to know about Lingala
Lingala is spoken in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Republic of the Congo.
Typing Lingala Characters
Lingala is written in a variation of the Latin alphabet which includes several special characters. It also uses diacritic marks to indicate tones.
There are two ways to type the special characters used in Lingala:
The simplest method is to use the character suggestions. To do so, type the base character for the letter you want, then select the special character from the set of characters which appears.
The other method is to use the virtual keyboard with the layout set to Lingala. (If necessary, you can change the layout by clicking 
and selecting an option in the Keyboard Language menu.)
Locate the character you want on the virtual keyboard, then click on it or press the corresponding key on your physical keyboard. Capital letters and certain punctuation marks are available by holding down the Shift key. Additional characters, including the vowels ɛ and ɔ, are available by holding down the Ctrl and Alt keys at the same time.
See Typing Accents and Special Characters for details on both typing methods.
Learning Tones
Lingala is a tonal language, meaning that different tones can change a word's meaning. As you work with your Lingala lists, pay special attention to the tones used by the native speakers when they pronounce each word. In many of the activities, you can listen to words as many times as you need to recognize their tones.