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LingoBear creates short Sango passages on topics you choose. Tap any word for an instant English translation and build your vocabulary as you read. Ubangian-based creole, co-official with French in the Central African Republic, Latin script with tone marks, simplified noun-class system, ~5M L2 speakers.

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What is Sango and where is it spoken?

Sango (yângâ tî sängö) developed in the late 19th century along the Ubangi river as a lingua franca derived primarily from the Niger-Congo (Ngbandi/Ubangian) language of riverboat workers. It has been the co-official language of the Central African Republic alongside French since 1991. About 350,000 speak it natively and around 5 million as a second language.

What's distinctive about Sango grammar?

Compared with related Niger-Congo languages, Sango's grammar is simplified — it has lost most noun-class agreement and uses few derivational affixes. Word order is SVO, plurals are formed with the prefix â- (zo 'person', âzo 'people'), and tense and aspect are marked with preverbal particles. Sango is a tonal language with three tones, written with diacritics in scholarly orthography.