Information AboutSango |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT SANGO LANGUAGE | |
| languages of the central african republic | |
| languages of the democratic republic of the congo | |
| pidgins and creoles | |
| african-based pidgins and creoles | |
| tonal languages | |
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Sango (also spelt Sangho) is the primary language spoken in the based on the language of the Sango tribe, belonging to the Ngbandi language cluster (including Ngbandi and Yakoma ), with many French words. Some linguists, following William J. Samarin , classify it as a Creole ; other linguists, however (eg Marcel Diki-Kidiri , Charles H. Morrill ) reject this classification, saying that changes in Sango structures (both internally and externally) can quite well be explained without a creolization process. 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 people. The situation might be compared to English , where most of the vocabulary - particularly "learned" words - is derived from Latin , Greek , or French , while the basic vocabulary remains strongly Germanic . However, more recent studies suggest that this result is specific to a particular sociolect - the so-called "functionary" variety. Morrill's work completed in 1997 revealed that there were three sociologically distinct norms emerging in the Sango language: an urban "radio" variety which is top-ranked by 80% of his interviewees, and has a very few French loan words, a so called "pastor" variety, which is scored 60%, and a "functionary" variety, spoken by learned people who make the highest use of French loan words while speaking Sango, and this variety scores 40% of the interviewees. The official orthography of Sango contains the following 'b.) Sango contains 7 oral Vowel s - a, e, ɛ, i, o, ɔ, u - of which five, i, a ɛ ɔ u, can occur Nasalized . In the official orthography, E stands for both e and ɛ and O stands for both o and ɔ. Nasal vowels are then written : in, en, an, on, un. Sango has three Tone s - low, mid, and high. In standard Orthography , low tone is unmarked (e), mid tone is marked with Dieresis (ë), and high tone with Circumflex (ê). So do-re-mi would be written do-rë-mî. The word order is , Dative , and Instrumental functions. Being a vehicular language, Sango is considered unusually easy to learn; according to Samarin, "with application a student ought to be able to speak the language in about three months." However, to reach true fluency takes much longer, as with any language. For English-speakers there are two main difficulties. Firstly, one must remember not to split the double-consonants - for example the place name Bambari must be pronounced ba-mba-ri and not bam-ba-ri. Secondly, as with any tonal language, one must learn not to vary the Tone according to the context. For example, if one pronounces a question with a rising tone as in English , one will inadvertently be saying an entirely different and inappropriate Sango word at the end of the sentence. BIBLIOGRAPHY
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