| Also Known As: Sangho,Sango
Description:
This article is about the language. For the fictional character from the Japanese anime and manga series InuYasha , see Sango (InuYasha).
Sango (also spelled Sangho) is the primary language spoken in the Central African Republic: it has 1.6 to 5 million second-language speakers, but only 400,000 native speakers, mainly in the towns. Originally used by river traders, it is a vehicular language, based on the language of the Sango tribe, belonging to the Ngbandi language cluster (including Ngbandi and Yakoma), with many French words. Some linguists, following William J. Samarin, classify it as a Ngbandi-based creole; other linguists, however (eg Marcel Diki-Kidiri, Charles H. Morrill) reject this classification, saying that changes in Sango structures (both internally and externally) can be explained quite well without a creolization process.
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, where most of the vocabulary -..... full article at Wikipedia |
Location of Sango Language Speakers
<googlemap zoom="1" width=400 height=300 lat="7.437808" lon="18.939052" type="map">
5.773519, 19.596855, Central African Republic
9.102097, 18.281250, Africa</googlemap>
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