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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:The creation and critique of a Central African myth
Author:Samarin, William J.ISNI
Year:1998
Periodical:Revue française d'histoire d'outre-mer
Volume:85
Issue:318
Pages:55-81
Language:English
Geographic term:Central African Republic
Subjects:lingua francas
Sango language
External link:https://doi.org/10.3406/outre.1998.3601
Abstract:Sango - the lingua franca and official language of the Central African Republic - must have begun to emerge as a new language through the pidginization of the local Ngbandi dialects on the upper Ubangi River at the very beginning of the colonization of the region, in the late 1880s, when Alphonse Van Gele, a representative of the État indépendant du Congo (EIC, or Congo Free State), remained more than a year with his ethnolinguistically diverse African auxiliaries. The pidgin seems to have become stabilized very quickly. In any case, its existence was noted as early as 1896. A very different account of the history of Sango is that of M. Diki-Kidiri, who alleges that Sango simply evolved from Dendi, already a vehicular language when Europeans arrived. The present author characterizes Diki-Kidiri's account as mythic, motivated by ideology and not grounded on historical and linguistic facts. He criticizes Diki-Kidiri's account and presents his own. He notes that the failure to admit what Sango really is as a language (that is, genetically and typologically) - namely, a pidgin - leads to erroneous sociocultural as well as linguistic history. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum in English and French.
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