Essential French phrases

The lingua franca of southern Congo and the language you will actually hear in the market here. French is the sole official language; Lingala belongs to Brazzaville and the river. Learning Kituba rather than Lingala is the single clearest signal that you were posted to Pointe-Noire and paid attention.

The language of the Bavili, the coastal people of the old Kingdom of Loango whose territory this city was built on. It is spoken along the Kouilou coast and is why place names here — Loango, Diosso, Ngoyo, Tchikobo — sound nothing like the ones upriver.

Hello — it travels everywhere in both Congos and works fine here too. But follow it with French rather than Lingala unless you know your interlocutor is from the north, because assuming everyone in Congo speaks Lingala is a Brazzaville habit that reads badly on the coast.

The 'wild coast' — the long Atlantic beach on the city's western edge, and the centre of its weekend life. The name is a warning as much as a description: the current and the undertow here kill people, and swimming is not what this beach is for.

The seafront quarter by the old jetty — bars, restaurants, villas and the expensive end of the rental market. If a colleague says they live 'au Wharf', you now know roughly what their housing allowance looks like.

The Chemin de Fer Congo-Océan, the 510 km railway to Brazzaville completed in 1934 at a human cost that made it internationally notorious. It is also still the answer to 'how do I get inland without flying' — one passenger train a week, up to sixteen hours.

'A hire, or a shared ride?' The blue-and-white taxis here work the same way as Brazzaville's green-and-whites: a shared hop costs a fixed small fare, a course with the cab to yourself costs several times more. Settle it before the door closes; there are no meters.

Money, and good/fine/agreed — the two words that end most transactions. With them: 'ekoki', enough, that is the price, we are finished haggling.

Never just 'the port': the Port Autonome de Pointe-Noire is the deepwater harbour through which essentially everything the country consumes arrives, and through which its containers leave. When people here say the port is slow, they are telling you why prices moved in Brazzaville.

What people from here call themselves. Getting it right matters more than it sounds: this city has a strong sense of being a place in its own right rather than a province of Brazzaville, and the demonym is where that starts.

The oil expatriate — a whole social category here, with its own compounds, its own school run and its own price level. Half the practical advice you will be given locally assumes you are one. If you are not, discount every housing number you hear by a factor you will find uncomfortably large.

The neighbourhood open-air bar-restaurant — plastic chairs, grilled fish, cold beer, music at volume. On this coast the fish is the point: it came off a boat this morning and it is being grilled in front of you.

Fish or meat wrapped in leaf with chilli and spice and steamed in the parcel. Order maboké de poisson at a beach grill and you have ordered the local dish correctly without needing a menu.

Pounded cassava leaves in palm oil, and the dense fermented cassava loaf you eat with them. Note the vocabulary: the Congolese say saka-saka where Kinshasa says pondu, and this is the kind of small word that tells people which Congo you learned in.