Only in Igbo 43
Only in Lingala 0
No unique sounds
What this means for learners
Igbo and Lingala share 22 sounds — roughly 34% of Lingala's inventory overlaps with Igbo. Shared sounds are ones a speaker already knows from their native language and will generally produce and perceive accurately without explicit training.
Conversely, Igbo has 43 sounds not used in Lingala. Native Lingala speakers learning Igbo will face the mirror-image challenge with these sounds.
Phoneme inventories from PHOIBLE. Data reflects one documented inventory per language; some variation exists across dialects and sources.