History
A variety of Sango was used as a vehicular language along the Ubangi River before French colonization in the late 1800s. The French army recruited Central Africans, causing them to increasingly use Sango as a means of inter-ethnic communication. Throughout the twentieth century missionaries promoted Sango due to its wide usage.
Originally used by river traders, Sango arose as a vehicular language 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 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. First, this has led to a rapid expansion of the lexicon, including both formal and slang terms. Second, its new position as the everyday language of the capital city has led to Sango gaining greater status and being used increasingly in fields where it was previously the norm to use French.
Read more about this topic: Sango Language
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