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The status of Sango in fact and fiction: on the one-hundredth anniversary of its conception
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Abstract:
This work is under copyright: the publisher should be contacted for permission to re-use or reprint this material in any form. ; It is a fact that Sango is one of the two official languages of the Central African Republic, the other being French. It acquired this role a few years ago, when André Kolingba was still president, a person whose native language is Yakoma, one of the several forms of Ngbandi, from which Sango is derived. Before then, it was the nation’s langue nationale, a role that was enshrined in the constitution at independence. Another fact, as revealed by the census of 1988, is that the percentage of Central Africans who know Sango is very high, but varying slightly from forty percent in the far east to ninety percent in some large towns or so-called villes; in the capital, as one might expect, almost everyone claims to know Sango; it would be embarrassing not to be able to do so. It is also a fact that in Bangui about forty-five percent of pre-school children (up to the age of about six) know no other language than Sango; they are therefore native speakers of this language (Samarin 1995). There are many other facts that can be cited without controversy. These, however, are not the subject of this work. Instead, I am concerned about some alleged facts: claims made about Sango that are words.
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Keyword:
Sango language
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URL: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/67173
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