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 … See more

A variety of Sango was used as a lingua franca along the Ubangi River before French colonization, in the late 1800s. The French army recruited Central Africans, causing them to increasingly use … See more

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 … See more

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 … See more

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 See more

Sango is an isolating language with subject–verb–object word order, as in English. Noun phrases are of the form determiner-adjective-noun:
Plurals are marked with the proclitic â-, which precedes noun phrases:
â- may be attached … See more

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 signed … See more