Sango language. Sango (also spelled Sangho) is a major language spoken in Central Africa, especially the Central African Republic, southern Chad and Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is an official language in the Central African Republic, where it is used as a lingua franca across the country and had 450,000 native speakers in 1988. It also has 1.6 million second language speakers. Sango is a language with contested classification, with some linguists considering it a Ngbandi-based creole, while others argue that the changes in Sango structures can be explained without a creolization process. It has many French loanwords, but its structure remains wholly Ngbandi. Sango was used as a lingua franca for trade along the Ubangi River before French colonisation in the late 1800s and has since expanded as an interethnic communication language. In colloquial speech, almost all of the language's vocabulary is Ngbandi based, whereas in more technical speech French loanwords constitute...
