Sango

Where it’s spoken

Sango is the lingua franca of the Central African Republic, where roughly 5 million speakers use it as either a first or second language. It originated as a trade pidgin along the Ubangi River in the 19th century, drawing primarily on the Ngbandi language. After independence in 1960, it was adopted as a national language alongside French and rapidly expanded as the everyday medium of urban communication.

What it sounds like

A tonal language (three tones — high, mid, low — sometimes marked, often not). Vocabulary is largely Ngbandi with extensive borrowings from French. Grammar is simplified relative to its source: no noun classes, no concord, basic SVO order.

How it’s written

The Latin alphabet with a standard orthography developed under Bokassa’s government in the 1980s. Tones are usually unmarked in everyday writing; diacritics appear in dictionaries and Bible translations.