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Sango (also spelled Sangho) is the primary language spoken in the Central African Republic and also the
official language An official language is a language given supreme status in a particular country, state, or other jurisdiction. Typically the term "official language" does not refer to the language used by a people or country, but by its government (e.g. judiciary, ...
of the country. It is used as a
lingua franca A lingua franca (; ; for plurals see ), also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, vehicular language, or link language, is a language systematically used to make communication possible between groups ...
across the country and had 450,000 native speakers in 1988. It also has 1.6 million
second language A person's second language, or L2, is a language that is not the native language (first language or L1) of the speaker, but is learned later. A second language may be a neighbouring language, another language of the speaker's home country, or a fo ...
speakers. Sango is a creole based on the Northern Ngbandi language. It was used as a
trade language A lingua franca (; ; for plurals see ), also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, vehicular language, or link language, is a language systematically used to make communication possible between groups ...
along the
Ubangi River The Ubangi River (), also spelled Oubangui, is the largest right-bank tributary of the Congo River in the region of Central Africa. It begins at the confluence of the Mbomou (mean annual discharge 1,350 m3/s) and Uele Rivers (mean annual discharge ...
prior to French colonisation in the 1880s. In colloquial speech 90% of the language's vocabulary is Sango, whereas in more technical speech French loanwords constitute the majority.


Classification

Some linguists, following William J. Samarin, classify it as a Ngbandi-based creole; however, others (like Marcel Diki-Kidiri, Charles H. Morrill) reject that classification and say that changes in Sango structures (both internally and externally) can be explained quite well without a creolization process. According to the creolization hypothesis, Sango is exceptional in that it is an African- rather than European-based creole. Although French has contributed numerous loanwords, Sango's structure is wholly African.


History

A variety of Sango was used as a
lingua franca A lingua franca (; ; for plurals see ), also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, vehicular language, or link language, is a language systematically used to make communication possible between groups ...
along the
Ubangi River The Ubangi River (), also spelled Oubangui, is the largest right-bank tributary of the Congo River in the region of Central Africa. It begins at the confluence of the Mbomou (mean annual discharge 1,350 m3/s) and Uele Rivers (mean annual discharge ...
before French colonization, in the late 1800s. The French army recruited Central Africans, causing them to increasingly use Sango as a means of interethnic communication. Throughout the 20th century, missionaries promoted Sango because of its wide usage. Originally used by river traders, Sango arose as a lingua franca based on the Northern Ngbandi dialect of the Sango tribe, part of the Ngbandi language cluster, with some French influence. The rapid growth of the city of
Bangui Bangui () (or Bangî in Sango, formerly written Bangi in English) is the capital and largest city of the Central African Republic. It was established as a French outpost in 1889 and named after its location on the northern bank of the Uban ...
since the 1960s has had significant implications for the development of Sango, with the creation, for the first time, of a population of first-language speakers. Whereas rural immigrants to the city spoke many different languages and used Sango only as a lingua franca, their children use Sango as their main (and sometimes only) language. That has led to a rapid expansion of the lexicon, including both formal and slang terms. Also, its new position as the everyday language of the capital city has led to Sango gaining greater status and being used increasingly in fields for which it was previously the norm to use French.


Geographic distribution

Sango is widespread in the Central African Republic, with 350,000 speakers at the 1970 census. It is also spoken as a lingua franca in southern Chad, where it is probably not spoken natively and its use is decreasing, and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where its use is increasing. Today, Sango is both a national and official language of the Central African Republic, which makes the Central African Republic one of the few African countries to have an indigenous language as an official language.


Registers

A study by Taber (1964) indicates that some 490 native Sango words account for about 90% of colloquial speech; however, while French loanwords are much more rarely used, they account for the majority of the vocabulary, particularly in the speech of learned people. The situation might be compared to English, in which most of the vocabulary, particularly "learned" words, is derived from
Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
,
Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
, or French while the basic vocabulary remains strongly Germanic. However, more recent studies suggest that the result is specific to a particular sociolect, the so-called "functionary" variety. Morrill's work, completed in 1997, revealed that there were three sociologically distinct norms emerging in the Sango language: an urban "radio" variety which is ranked by 80% of his interviewees and has very few French loan words; a so-called "pastor" variety, which is scored 60%; and a "functionary" variety, spoken by learned people, who make the highest use of French loanwords while speaking Sango, which scores 40%.


Phonology


Vowels

Sango has seven oral and five nasal vowels. Vowel quality and number of nasalized vowels may be affected by the mother tongue of non-native speakers of Sango.


Consonants

Palatal affricates occur in loan words and certain dialects. Some dialects have alternations between ��vand ��band ��͡ᵐg͡b ��band word-medial and and word-initial and ��vis quite rare.


Syllable structure

Syllable structure is generally CV. Consecutive vowels are rare but do occur. Consonants may be palatalized or labialized, orthographically C and C, respectively. Words are generally monosyllabic or bisyllabic but less commonly are trisyllabic. Four-syllable words are created via
reduplication In linguistics, reduplication is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word (or part of it) or even the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change. The classic observation on the semantics of reduplication is Edwar ...
and compounding, and may also be written as two words (''kêtêkêtê'' or ''kêtê kêtê'' 'tiny bit', ''walikundû'' or ''wa likundû'' 'sorcerer').


Tone

Sango is a tonal language. The language has three basic tones (high, mid, and low), with contour tones also occurring, generally in French loanwords. Tones have a low
functional load In linguistics and especially phonology, functional load, or phonemic load, refers to the importance of certain features in making distinctions in a language. In other words, features with a high functional load distinguish more words from others ...
, but
minimal pair In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, spoken or signed, that differ in only one phonological element, such as a phoneme, toneme or chroneme, and have distinct meanings. They are used to demonstrate th ...
s exist: ''dü'' 'give birth' versus ''dû'' 'hole'. Monosyllabic loan words from French usually have the tone pattern high-low falling (''bâan'' 'bench' from French ''banc''). In multisyllabic words all syllables carry low tone except the final syllable, which is lengthened and takes a descending tone. The final tone is generally mid-low falling for nouns (''ananäa'' 'pineapple' from French ''ananas'') and high-low falling for verbs (''aretêe'' 'to stop' from French ''arrêter''). In isolation, tones have ideolectal variation, and they may also be affected by the mother language of non-native speakers.


Grammar

Sango is an
isolating language An isolating language is a type of language with a morpheme per word ratio close to one, and with no inflectional morphology whatsoever. In the extreme case, each word contains a single morpheme. Examples of widely spoken isolating languages a ...
with subject–verb–object word order, as in English. Noun phrases are of the form determiner-adjective-noun: Plurals are marked with the
proclitic In morphology and syntax, a clitic (, backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a w ...
''â-'', which precedes noun phrases: ''â-'' may be attached to multiple items in the noun phrase by some speakers, but this is less common: The derivational suffix ''-ngö'' nominalizes verbs. It also changes all tones in the verb to mid: Genitives are normally formed with the preposition ''tî'' 'of': However, compounding is becoming increasingly common: ''dûngü'' 'well' (note the change in tone). Such compounds are sometimes written as two separate words. The verbal prefix ''a-'' is used when the subject is a noun or noun phrase but not when the subject is either a pronoun or implicit (as in imperatives): The prefix is sometimes written as a separate word. The
pronoun In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun ( abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not c ...
s are ''mbï'' "I", ''mo'' "you (singular)", ''lo'' "he, she, it", ''ë'' "we", ''ï'' "you (plural)", ''âla'' "you (plural)", ''âla'' "they". Wikibooks:Sango/Pronouns Verbs take a prefix ''a-'' if not preceded by a pronoun: ''mo yeke'' "you are" but ''Bêafrîka ayeke'' "Central Africa is". Particularly useful verbs include ''yeke'' "be", ''bara'' "greet" (''bara o'' "hi!"), ''hînga'' "know". Possessives and appositives are formed with the word ''tî'' "of": ''ködörö tî mbï'' "my country", ''yângâ tî sängö'' "Sango language". Another common preposition is ''na'', covering a variety of
locative In grammar, the locative case (abbreviated ) is a grammatical case which indicates a location. It corresponds vaguely to the English prepositions "in", "on", "at", and "by". The locative case belongs to the general local cases, together with the ...
,
dative In grammar, the dative case ( abbreviated , or sometimes when it is a core argument) is a grammatical case used in some languages to indicate the recipient or beneficiary of an action, as in "Maria Jacobo potum dedit", Latin for "Maria gave Jacob ...
, and
instrumental An instrumental is a recording normally without any vocals, although it might include some inarticulate vocals, such as shouted backup vocals in a big band setting. Through semantic widening, a broader sense of the word song may refer to instrum ...
functions.


Orthography

Sango began being written by French missionaries, with Catholic and Protestant conventions differing slightly. The 1966 Bible and 1968 hymnal were highly influential and still used today. In 1984, President
André Kolingba André-Dieudonné Kolingba (12 August 1936 – 7 February 2010) was a Central African politician, who was the fourth President of the Central African Republic (CAR), from 1 September 1981 until 1 October 1993. He took power from President David ...
signed "Décret No 84.025", establishing an official
orthography An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation. Most transnational languages in the modern period have a writing system, and mos ...
for Sango. The official Sango alphabet consists of 22 letters: : Letters are pronounced as their IPA equivalent except for , pronounced as Also, the digraphs are pronounced , , , , , , and , respectively. , , and may be used in loan words not fully integrated into Sango's phonological system. The official orthography contains the following consonants: : some add for the
implosive Implosive consonants are a group of stop consonants (and possibly also some affricates) with a mixed glottalic ingressive and pulmonic egressive airstream mechanism.''Phonetics for communication disorders.'' Martin J. Ball and Nicole Müller. Ro ...
. Sango has seven oral
vowel A vowel is a Syllable, syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in Vowel ...
s, , of which five, , occur
nasalized In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is . In the Internatio ...
. In the official orthography, stands for both and , and stands for both and ; nasal vowels are written . Sango has three tones: low, mid, and high. In standard orthography, low tone is unmarked, , mid tone is marked with diaeresis, , and high tone with
circumflex The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from la, circumflexus "bent around"a ...
, : ''do-re-mi'' would be written . Sango has little written material apart from religious literature, but some basic literacy material has been developed.


Learning

Sango is considered unusually easy to learn; according to Samarin, "with application a student ought to be able to speak the language in about three months." However, reaching true fluency takes much longer, as with any other language. For English-speakers there are two main difficulties. One must remember not to split double consonants:
Bambari Bambari is a town in the Central African Republic, lying on the Ouaka River. It has a population of 41,356 (2003 census) and is the capital of Ouaka prefecture. Bambari is an important market town and is home to Bambari Airport, and the Ro ...
, for example, must be pronounced ba-mba-ri, not bam-ba-ri. Also, as with any other tonal language, one must learn not to vary the tone according to the context. For example, if one pronounces a question with a rising tone as in English, one may inadvertently be saying an entirely different and inappropriate Sango word at the end of the sentence.


See also

* *


References


Bibliography

* Buquiaux, Luc. Jean-Marie Kobozo et Marcel Diki-Kidiri, 1978 ''Dictionnaire sango-français...'' * Diki-Kidiri, Marcel. 1977. ''Le sango s'écrit aussi...'' * Diki-Kidiri, Marcel. 1978. ''Grammaire sango, phonologie et syntaxe'' * Diki-Kidiri, Marcel. 1998. ''Dictionnaire orthographique du sängö'' * Henry, Charles Morrill. 1997. ''Language, Culture and Sociology in the Central African Republic, The Emergence and Development of Sango'' * * Khabirov, Valeri. 1984. ''The Main Features of the Grammatical System of Sango'' (PhD thesis, St. Petersburg University, in Russian) * Khabirov, Valeri. 2010. ''Syntagmatic Morphology of Contact Sango''. Ural State Pedagogical University. 310 p. * * Samarin, William. 1967. ''Lessons in Sango''. * Saulnier, Pierre. 1994. ''Lexique orthographique sango'' * SIL (Centrafrique), 1995. ''Kêtê Bakarî tî Sängö: Farânzi, Anglëe na Yângâ tî Zâmani. Petit Dictionnaire Sango, Mini Sango Dictionary, Kleines Sango Wörterbuch'' * * Taber, Charles. 1964. ''French Loanwords in Sango: A Statistical Analysis''. (MA thesis, Hartford Seminary Foundation.) * Thornell, Christina. 1997. ''The Sango Language and Its Lexicon (Sêndâ-yângâ tî Sängö)''


External links