Mongo, also called Nkundo or Mongo-Nkundu (Lomongo, Lonkundu), is a Bantu language spoken by several of the Mongo peoples in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Mongo speakers reside in the north-west of the country over a large area inside the curve of the Congo River. Mongo is a tonal language. There are several dialects. Maho (2009) lists one of these, Bafoto (Batswa de l'Equateur), C.611, as a separate language. The others are:

Phonology

Consonants

Vowels

Oral literature

In 1921, Edward Algernon Ruskin, a Christian missionary at Bongandanga from 1891 until 1935 in what was then the Belgian Congo, published Mongo Proverbs and Fables, with the Mongo text and an English translation. As Ruskin explains in the foreword to the book, his goal was to train missionaries in the Mongo language. The book contains 405 Mongo proverbs. Here are some examples: There are also 21 Mongo fables in the book, including a story about Ulu, the trickster Tortoise. In an earlier booklet, Proverbs, Fables, Similes and Sayings of the Bamongo, published in 1897, Ruskin provides a word by word analysis of some Mongo proverbs, often accompanied by a brief fable. In 1909, Frederick Starr published a collection of 150 Nkundo (Mongo) proverbs with English translations, "Proverbs of Upper Congo," which he selected from a 1904 publication, ''Bekolo bi' ampaka ba Nkundo. Bikolongo la nsako. Beki Bakola otakanyaka (Stories of the Elders of Nkundo: Adages and Proverbs Gathered by Bakola'') by Bakola, also known as Ellsworth Farris, and Royal J. Dye, missionaries based near Coquilhatville (now Mbandaka). Here are some of those proverbs: Starr is also the author of A Bibliography of Congo Languages. For more recent bibliography, see A. J. de Rop's La littérature orale mongo, published in 1974. For a comprehensive study of Mongo proverbs, see Hulstaert's Proverbes mongo, published in 1958, which contains over 2500 Mongo proverbs with accompanying French translations.