The Sango Language: Three Things to Know

Sango is the official language of the Central African Republic, and is also native to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Chad. By having Sango as the official and national language, the Central Republic of Africa is bucking the trend of many African countries which tend to use Arabic, French, English and other languages brought over thanks to colonization. About 400,000 people speak Sango as their native language, with an estimated 5 million people speaking it as a second language.

Here are three things you should know to better understand Sango and those who speak it:

1. It was once (and still is in some areas) a lingua franca

The use of Sango as a lingua franca dates back to the time before colonization by the French back in the 1800s. At the time, the Sango spoken was not the same as what is spoken today, but it was used as a way for different ethnic groups to communicate with each other. It is related to a dialect of Ngbandi spoken in the area of the Ubangi river. Since rivers are prime trade areas, it makes sense that a lingua franca would have to be used by traders and anyone else living and working nearby. Back in the 1960s, when the capital city of the Central African Republic was experiencing a population boom thanks to immigration from rural areas, Sango became a native language. Immigrants learned it as a second language, but their children learned it as their mother tongue. In areas outside of the Central African Republic, it is still used as a lingua franca.

2. Some linguists classify it as a creole

The classification of Sango as a creole based on the Ngbandi language is a very popular theory among linguists. If you look at the history of its development as a language, it does make sense. Since it was used as a lingua franca among African traders of different ethnic backgrounds, it could have easily used the basic structure of Ngbandi, a language spoken along a river used extensively for trading, and taken vocabulary and possibly some grammar from other languages spoken in the surrounding areas and by the traders themselves. The creolization theory is also popular because it would mean that Sango is the only creole based on a native African language. There are some linguists, however, who claim that Sango could have easily developed through a process other than creolization.

4. Sango grammar is similar to English grammar

Though Sango differs from English in many ways, especially in terms of being a tonal language, many English speakers find it easier to learn than some other languages. This is mostly due to the fact that Sango and English grammar follow similar patterns. Both use the subject-verb-object ordering of words as well as using the same order for noun phrases (determiner-adjective-noun). Because of these grammatical similarities, the only real challenges an English speaker faces when learning Sango are related to pronunciation, like using the correct tones and remembering to keep double consonants together.

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Tags: Africa, creole, native language

Category: Foreign Language