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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. The primary language of the Sango people (or Basango, Bosango, Sangho, Sangos), it is an official language in the Central African Republic, where it is used as a lingua franca across the country. Although there are no statistics to quantify people who speak it as a first versus second language, almost all 5,500,000 people in the Central African Republic speak it as of 2025.
Sango is a language with contested classification, with some linguists considering it a Ngbandi-based Creole language, 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 trade language along the Ubangi River before Ubangi-Shari 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 the majority. Sango has three distinct sociolinguistic norms: an urban "radio" variety, a "pastor" variety, and a "functionary" variety spoken by learned people who make the highest use of French loanwords.
Sango is a tonal language with subject-verb-object word order, and its orthography was officially established in 1984. It has limited written material, mainly focused on religious literature. Sango is considered easy to learn, although reaching true fluency takes time, as with any other language. The main difficulties for English speakers are pronunciation and tone management.
According to the creolization hypothesis, Sango is exceptional in that it is an African- rather than European-based creole. Although French language has contributed numerous loanwords, Sango's structure is wholly African.
Originally used by river traders, Sango arose as a lingua franca based on the Northern Ngbandi dialect of the Sango people, part of the Ngbandi language cluster, with some French language 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. That has led to a rapid expansion of the lexicon, including both formal and slang terms. Also, its new position as the everyday language of the capital city has led to Sango gaining greater status and being used increasingly in fields for which it was previously the norm to use French.
Today, Sango is both a national and official language of the Central African Republic, which makes the Central African Republic one of the few African countries to have an indigenous language as an official language.
| + Sango vowels ! rowspan="2" | ! colspan="2" | ! colspan="2" | |
| + Sango consonants ! colspan="2" | ! Labial consonant
! Dental consonant
! Alveolar
! Palatal
! Velar consonant
! Labial- velar ! Glottal |
Palatal affricates occur in loan words and certain dialects. Some dialects have alternations between ᶬv and m, ᵐb and ᵑ͡ᵐg͡b, ᵐb and b, word-medial l and r, and word-initial h and ʔ. ᶬv is quite rare.
Words are generally monosyllabic or bisyllabic but less commonly are trisyllabic. Four-syllable words are created via reduplication and compounding, and may also be written as two words ( kêtêkêtê or kêtê kêtê 'tiny bit', walikundû or wa likundû 'sorcerer').
Monosyllabic loan words from French usually have the tone pattern high-low falling ( bâan 'bench' from French banc). In multisyllabic words all syllables carry low tone except the final syllable, which is lengthened and takes a descending tone. The final tone is generally mid-low falling for nouns ( ananäa 'pineapple' from French ananas) and high-low falling for verbs ( aretêe 'to stop' from French arrêter).
In isolation, tones have variation, and they may also be affected by the mother languages of non-native speakers.
Plurals are marked with the proclitic â-, which precedes noun phrases:
â- may be attached to multiple items in the noun phrase by some speakers, but this is less common:
The derivational suffix -ngö verbs. It also changes all tones in the verb to mid:
| to return, repeat |
| return |
Genitives are normally formed with the preposition tî 'of':
However, compounding is becoming increasingly common: dûngü 'well' (note the change in tone). Such compounds are sometimes written as two separate words.
The verbal prefix a- is used when the subject is a noun or noun phrase but not when the subject is either a pronoun or implicit (as in imperatives):
The prefix is sometimes written as a separate word.
The are mbï "I", mo "you (singular)", lo "he, she, it", ë "we", ï "you (plural)", âla "you (plural)", âla "they". Verbs take a prefix a- if not preceded by a pronoun: mo yeke "you are" but Bêafrîka ayeke "Central Africa is". Particularly useful verbs include yeke "be", bara "greet" ( bara o "hi!"), hînga "know". Possessives and appositives are formed with the word tî "of": ködörö tî mbï "my country", yângâ tî sängö "Sango language". Another common preposition is na, covering a variety of locative, dative, and instrumental functions.
In 1984, President André Kolingba signed "Décret No 84.025", establishing an official orthography for Sango. The official Sango alphabet consists of 22 letters:
| + Official 1984 orthography | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 22-Letter Sango Alphabet | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Z | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Letters are pronounced as their IPA equivalent except for , pronounced as j. Also, the digraphs are pronounced , , , , , , and , respectively.
, , and may be used in loan words not fully integrated into Sango's phonological system.
The official orthography contains the following : : some add for the implosive . Sango has seven oral , , of which five, , occur nasal vowel. In the official orthography, stands for both and , and stands for both and ; nasal vowels are written .
Sango has three tones: low, mid, and high. In standard orthography, low tone is unmarked, , mid tone is marked with diaeresis, , and high tone with circumflex, : do-re-mi would be written .
Sango has little written material apart from religious literature, but some basic literacy material has been developed.
For English-speakers there are two main difficulties. One must remember not to split double consonants: Bambari, for example, must be pronounced ba-mba-ri, not bam-ba-ri. Also, as with any other 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 may inadvertently be saying an entirely different and inappropriate Sango word at the end of the sentence.
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