n recent years, refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo, plagued by decades of civil war, have settled in Elizabeth, a city with a long history of welcoming immigrants from all over the world. Some are speakers of Kinyarwanda, which is widely spoken in the eastern DRC, while others may speak Swahili (the regional franca), Lingala (the language of Kinshasa), Tshiluba, and other languages, depending in part on their route to the U.S., which may have gone via neighborhing countries.