Leçons d'Afrique

COLLECTION AFRIQUE ET LANGAGE

2

Leçons d'Afrique Filiations, ruptures et reconstitution

de langues

Un hommage \ a

Gabriel Manessy

Édité par Robert NICOLAÏ

avec l'aide de Paulette Roulon-Doko et le concours de Jean-Philippe Dalbera

et Carole de Féral

PEETERS Louvain-Paris

2001

William J. SAMARIN'

Explaining shift to sango in Bangui

Résumé Le fait d'être sangophone de la première enfance à Bangui, capitale de la République

centrafricaine, ne s'explique pas seulement par les mariages interethniques, comme c'est couramment supposé lorsqu'on parle de changement de langue en Afrique. On constate que la vernacularisation du sango y est très variable et qu'elle dépend de l'ethnicité, de l'âge, du lieu de naissance, de l'éducation, et du lieu de résidence à Bangui. Ces conclusions sont basées sur l'analyse du recensement de 1988 et sur des interviews effectués dans la population entre 1988 et 1994.

Mots-clefs

Bangui, expansion, sango, vernacularisation, villes.

Abstract The incidence of native speakers of Sango among the inhabitants of Bangui, the capital of

the Republic of Central Africa, is extremely variable, depending not only on inter-ethnic marriages, as has been commonly claimed for language shift in Africa, but also on ethnicity, age and place of birth, education, and place of residence in the city. The conclusions are based on an analysis of the census of 1988 and on interviews among different segments of the population between 1988 and 1994. Keywords Bangui, cities, nativization, shift, Sango.

* Emeritus, Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto. E-mail : [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

352 WILLIAM SAMARIN

INTRODUCTION1

Although we know quite a bit about language change in modern, industrialized cities — but primarily in the English-speaking world — we know very little about what is going on in the cities of the third world (Samarin, 1997a). This neglect is all the more significant, because in many cases urbanization is a recent phenomenon and the cities are also linguistically diverse, leading to changes of a different kind than found in, for example, the English of Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, and Toronto or the French of Montréal, Québec. A contribution with respect to Bangui, therefore, ought to satisfy some of the need for more diversification in our understanding of language change and change in the patterns of language usage. Since, moreover, age, class, and gender have been found to be the most significant variables with respect to variation (mostly phonological) in contemporary cities (as argued in Chambers, 1995), are they of equal significance with respect to language maintenance and language shift in Bangui and other African cities ? It is this question that underlies the significance of this paper.

Data of different kinds gathered in different manners reveal that the number of native speakers of Sango has been growing recently at a rapid rate. This fact is not neatly explained by the variables used in variationism. Class, even when determined by education, does not explain much. Age is, of course, an important variable, because children are tending not to learn their parents' languages. Gender is a factor sometimes. And ethnolinguistically mixed marriages are to some degree a factor also, but in variable degrees in different places in the city. Ethnicity, it turns, out may be the most important correlate with whether or not a person speaks Sango or both Sango and at least one parental ethnic language.

Bangui was created as a tiny military outpost in June of 1889 ; today its population is over one-half million. It is, however, hardly a city by western standards, being little more than a very large version of the so-called centres

1 Although this study is intended to be a serious and responsible description of the nativization of Sango in Bangui, it is not the result of a project aimed primarily at this goal. That was to discover and describe the linguistic changes that had taken place in the language since I had learned it in 1952. But since nativization was one of the sociolinguistic variables that I assumed might correlate with some changes - a hypothesis that has not yet been confirmed - I naturally collected data wherever and whenever I could - constrained, obstructed, and handicapped by many of the factors and events with which field workers are familiar and many that were new to me. Several small and large grants made possible research on Sango, starting with one in 1972 from the American Philosophical Society and another from the International Studies Program of the University of Toronto. A period of research in France was also made possible by the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). Large grants came from the Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada. Help was given by so many individuals that I cannot possibly list them here. With the analysis of the data and preparation of the charts, however, Helen Yuet Yee Kwan should be cited.

EXPLAINING SHIFT TO SANGO IN BANGUI 353

urbains or villes o f the provinces2 (By the end of the 1960s only Bambar i , Berberat i , and B o u a r h a d popula t ions of be tween twenty-f ive and thirty-five thousand [Kalck, P., 1971 : 11]). Bangui is, to b e sure, the political and educat ional center o f the nation, ha s electricity in m o s t o f the city, has qui te a f ew two-story bui ld ings and apar tment houses of six or seven stories, and has commerc ia l bui ldings and open-air marke t s in di f ferent locations. A s a na t ion ' s capital , however , it is a h u m b l e place by compar i son to Abid jan , Brazzavil le , Dakar , Kinshasa , and Nairobi — to ment ion only those with which I a m famil iar . Nonetheless , Bangui is where Central Af r icans seem to prefer to live, in the hope that they can earn enough to en joy the var ious aspects of mode rn life. For that reason all the languages of the nat ion, as well as languages from other parts of Afr ica , are found in it3.

W e concern ourselves in this chapter no t with linguistic change in the fo rmal sense, no r wi th pat terns of l anguage use in the city (like C. Ju i l la rd ' s for Ziguinchor in Senegal [1995] and M . D é c h a m p s - W e n e z o u i ' s for a couple of quartiers in Bangui [1981]), bu t with the nativizat ion of Sango in Bangui : the acquisi t ion of this language in chi ldhood as THE FIRST ONE, as French wou ld be a m o n g children born to immigran ts in France. This is impl ied by the use of the

2 Although Sango has acquired much more status in the last couple of decades than it once had in comparison to French, words from the latter language reflect social changes in Sango. Thus, whereas geographical space was once divided between the kodro « village » (the inhabited world) — wherever it might be — and ngondà « the bush » (the uninhabited world), it is now divided first between the capital — at least from the point of view of its inhabitants — and les provinces. The whole rural area used to be referred to as the ngondà. 3 This would appear to be the case according to the names that were given in the census of 1988 as the native languages of Bangui's inhabitants. On the other hand, names used in the census may in some cases distinguish — and in other cases unite — entities that a linguist might identify as languages in some rigorous sense. When language names are grouped in a rational and genetic manner, we find that the most frequently cited are Gbaya, Banda, Yakoma, and Ngbaka-Gbanziri — in that order. They make up 74.3 % of the population, eleven other groups only 14.9 % ; the remaining 11 % represent native speakers of Sango. (These four linguistic groups account for most of the population of the République Centrafricaine [henceforth RCA], all related in the Ubangian family [for an overview see Y. Monino, 1988], The Gbaya and Banda groups consist of quite a few dialects, some of them different enough to be considered distinct languages on the basis of lexical differences and mutual incomprehensibility. Unfortunately, it would appear that the category of Gbaya in the census is not a pure one and may include a somewhat small number of Central African languages not belonging to the Gbaya family). — Census data were made available to me on diskettes by the Summer Institute of Linguistics /Société de Linguistique Internationale, with special help from Jutta Bliihberger and Irene Tucker. The data were prepared for analysis on the main-frame with the Social Sciences Statistical Package by Line Ruus of the Data Library of the University of Toronto. Philip Webb, using the Social Sciences Statistical Package, with a very small budget, analyzed some of the findings reported here and commented on earlier versions of this paper. Without a doubt a finer analysis would lead to much more sophisticated conclusions than are presented here.

354 WILLIAM SAMARIN

word shift in the title of this work : a p h e n o m e n o n that characterizes a speech communi ty , the consequence of individual histories of l anguage acquisit ion4 . W h e n this happens wi th speakers of a l ingua f r anca (hy which I m e a n the same as langue véhiculaire), it is called vernacularisation by s o m e of m y French colleagues. A n d when this happens to a pidgin, it has been cal led b y m a n y ang lophone linguists creolization. It would fo l low that a pidgin that has been nat ivized h a s b y defini t ion b e c o m e a creole5. Because I consider Sango to have been since its incept ion at the end of the last century a p idgin in an academic sense — a n e w language that emerged dur ing a per iod when there was an immedia te need for communica t ion , based on one language (in this case Ngbandi ) 6 , resul t ing in considerable reduct ion in vocabulary, a m o n g other things — it fol lows that insofar as it ha s h a d nat ive speakers since at least the

4 Shift is therefore different from expansion as used by writers in French. For Marcel Diki-Kidiri (1981) it seems to mean spread over a territory ; for Louis-Jean Calvet (1981:14) it has this meaning but also seems to comprehend shift : vehicular languages « gagnent du terrain et vont parfois jusqu'à s'imposer comme langue unique ». 5 Not being familiar with our terminology, M. Diki-Kidiri has created mischief by attributing to me a « creolistic model » for Sango's history (1981). And L.-J. Calvet finds fault with my characterizing Sango as a creole in one of my early works (1992: 10 ; see Samarin,, W. J., 1966), although he earlier used the word as most linguists do : « pidgin qui [...] est devenu la langue maternelle d'une communauté » (1981 : 75). The contusion may lie in definitions of other words. For L.-J. Calvet a pidgin is a « langue composite » (1981 : 96), but the linguistic nature of such a language is not described by him. In any case, he discounts the significance of the linguistic nature of a creole, even though it derives from a pidgin : « Ce qui prime [...] ici [...] ce n'est pas tant la structure interne du créole, mais bien ce que cette structure nous dit sur l'histoire de la communauté qui parle créole » (1981 : 76). It would appear that L. J. Calvet does not consider Sango to be a pidgin in origin and would not consider it, in any case, a creole, because there is no community that speaks it. It is also possible that communauté for him and other francophone writers does not have the same meaning that community of speakers has among anglophone linguists writing in the context of sociolinguistics and the ethnography of communication for the last three decades and more. But in the light of the following, that would be a gratuitous explanation. After Arabic was introduced into Khartoum there resulted, L. J. Calvet says, « une sorte de pidgin à fonction véhiculaire [possibly meaning Juba Arabie], qui se créolisa ensuite dans certaines parties de la population » (1981 : 62). In any case, the word communauté does have a special meaning for M. Diki-Kidiri : thus, « communautés linguistiques ont une conscience claire d'elles-mêmes [as in Haiti] » (Diki-Kidiri, M., 1982 : 39). 6 In this work Ngbandi is used generically for the whole group of mutually intelligible dialects whenever discussion is of a linguistic nature. In the RCA they are known as Sango, Yakoma (the name most frequently used of the ethnic language), and Dendi ; in the Congo as Ngbandi, Mongwandi, Mongbandi, etc.


1930s (as is demonstrated below), it can also be called a creole typologically7. These native speakers of Sango shall be referred to in this work as being Sangophone in a restrictive sense : i.e., NATIVE SPEAKERS, not just speakers of Sango8.

It should be understood that the brief review contained in the preceding paragraph does not represent views of some of my francophone colleagues. Marcel Diki-Kidiri, of Central African origin, has asserted, for example, that Sango's origin is in an indigenous lingua franca that existed before colonization (see W. J. Samarin 1987, 1998a). Moreover, others — like Gabriel Manessy and Louis-Jean Calvet — who have cited Sango in the context of discussing language change in Africa have never to my knowledge recognized that Sango is in origin a pidgin. These three authors explain Sango's linguistic features as being the consequence of its life as a vehicular language (i.e., a lingua franca), although G. Manessy also invokes urbanization. The first person to have done the latter — and possibly the source of G. Manessy's opinion — seems to have been André Jacquot. He reported the following : « Les jeunes gens nés ou venus très tôt dans cette ville [i.e., Bangui] ont une langue qui se distingue de celle des personnes plus âgées, [...] Il semble se former une langue caractérisée par une simplification poussée, un sango 'urbain' que Ton pourrait également appeler ' sango minimum', et qui paraît évoluer avec une grande rapidité » (1961 : 165). In the English summary the statement is weaker : « I t would appear that the form of Sango spoken at Bangui by young people is changing rapidly from the Sango spoken in the bush [in the rural interior] » (1961 : 166)9. Although A. Jacquot refers to Sango as «langue vêhiculaire»,

7 By contrast, it has been said that « the existence of Creole [i.e., native] speakers of Tok Pisin in any significant numbers can be dated no earlier than the mid-1950s ... » (Sankoff, G. & Brown, P., 1976 : 663). 8 In this paragraph and elsewhere in this work a number of critical terms are used from both English and French, some used differently by some anglophone and francophone writers. My use of those in English reflects the lexicon of most of my collègues writing about pidgin and Creole languages. Attention should be given therefore to the following words in both languages : communauté/community, creole/créole, creolization, ethnic language, expansion, first language, jargon, language spread, langue maternelle, langue vêhiculaire, vehicular language, nativiser, nativisation/nativization, native language, native speaker, pidgin, pidginisé/pidginized, sabir, Sangophone, sangophonie, shift, standard language, vernacular language/langue vernaculaire, vemacularisation, village language. 9 Since no evidence is provided, we are entitled to consider the possibility that this statement is based on what one or more Central Africans told Jacquot. In any case, tape-recordings I made in Bangui in 1962 and elsewhere — data on which my grammar of 1967 is based — contradict this observation. One of the goals of my field work in 1962 was to determine how much truth there was in allegations that were being made by Europeans about diversity of various kinds in Sango. Having travelled the perimeter of the RCA in the 1950s and again in 1962 (for which there is a map in Samarin, 1967) and having lived in Bangui for more than a year from 1988 to 1994,1 am personally familiar with and have made tape-recordings of the widest possible variety of the

356 WILLIAM SAMARIN

which has « son origine dans l'idiome des Sango de Mobaye » (1962 : 55), he later called it a « sabir » (1971 : 357), making no distinction between the alleged rural and urban forms ; and in personal correspondence (10 October 1959) he referred to Sango as one of the « pidgin languages » [of the world]. And François Villien, citing no source whatsoever, makes this erroneous statement about the language : « [Le sango] est devenu une sorte de sabir, truffé de mots français qui font que cette langue africaine contient essentiellement des racines latines » (Villien, Fr., 1987 : 844-845)10. P. Wald, another francophone scholar whose work in psycholinguistics has exposed him to Sango and Yakoma, also avoids calling Sango a pidgin : for him it is « ex-véhiculaire vernacularisé [but apparently not as first language] dans l'usage des citadins », and refers to this as « sango urbain », he too leaving unclear whether he would consider rural Sango different from urban Sango (1987 : 674). His colleague Pierre Achard, however, even when discussing P. Wald's work, refers to the language as a « langue commune » ; in origin « c'était [but as it still is throughout the country (wjs)] une langue véhiculaire, variété pidginisé du yakoma » (1993 : 40)11. (P. Achard's implied sango commun has been prematurely called sango standard by M. Diki-Kidiri). My views — considerably different from these — have been extensively argued (for which see the References), and I have responded to the other views in Samarin, W. J. 1998a, in press.

These and other statements by my French colleagues about Sango puzzle me greatly. Take that of M.-Fr. Adrien-Rongier, who alleges that Sango « est surtout considéré comme Tangue de Bangui' par les habitants de province, et à

language, including the speech of three different groups of street-kids (gôdèbè) ; I have samples from at least 1,500 persons in Bangui alone. I make the following arguable claims. (1) I do not believe that there is any evidence of dialects (i.e., geolinguistic varieties) of Sango in the strict sense of the term. Of course, one will find people in the northwest whose Sango has a Kaba accent, elsewhere people with a Banda accent. (2) I do not believe that there are any varieties of Sango that are significantly different from others in being simpler, on the one hand, or more elaborated, on the other hand. (3) The most linguistically unique variety of Sango is that of young people in Bangui, which is characterized primarily by massive contractions, a fact that would make their speech difficult to understand by someone not familiar with these innovations (Samarin, W. J., 1997b). (4) The Sango of Bangui is characterized as urban speech, because (a) the style of life is different from that of rural areas, because (b) the personnel of Radio Bangui have consciously developed a variety or style of their own, and because (c) French has more influence on Sango than anywhere else. (5) Persons of Yakoma-Sango ethnicity speak a variety of Sango in Bangui that can be distinguished from that of people of other ethnicities on the basis of the frequencies of occurrence of certain variants of certain words. Such a difference was found with two variants of the preposition tf « of » between Yakoma and Gbaya boys and girls between the ages of twelve and fifteen (see below) 1 0 On French words in Sango see Taber, Ch. R., 1964 ; Walker, J. & Samarin, W. J., 1992 ; Joyce, H. & Samarin, W. J., 1997 ; and Thornell, Chr., 1997. 11 P. Achard also uses the words nativiser and nativisation as one does in English (1993 : 45ff).


Bangui comme Tangue des fonctionnaires' par ceux qui ne le sont pas ; tendance que l'impact de la radio et de l'école est en train de faire évoluer rapidement » (1981 : 107). It would appear that this is what some of her Gbaya informants led her to believe, because she also claims that « l'utilisation cornante du gbaya [...] garde la primauté au détriment du sango », a claim that may have been politically motivated, as the one by Yakoma men in my own research, for which see below (1981 : 107). In my own experience in the 1950s the rural Gbaya may have characterized Sango as being the language of soldiers or of the markets, but not especially that of Bangui. Moreover, when I interviewed every individual in a Gbaya village about thirty-five km from Bossangoa in the early 1960s, I was told that whereas Gbeya, as the people call it, was the village (that is, ethnic) language, the language of the country was Sango, and French was the whites' language. Data from the country's census of 1988 demonstrate the widespread knowledge of Sango among Bangui's older inhabitants — that is, when M.-Fr. Adrien-Rongier was in Central Africa.

The nativization of Sango on a grand scale in Bangui — leading to language shift — was not predictable in the colonial context. As an interested and trained linguistic observer in the last decade of that era, I might have predicted an increase in the number of people speaking Sango in the rural areas, and in Bangui an increase in its function as an inter-ethnic medium of communication (i.e., a lingua franca). In other words, more and more people would have added Sango to their linguistic repertoires and used it more frequently and in more contexts. The stable multilingualism that was already in place would have changed in degree more than in kind. French would have remained the language of prestige and the means for a better living. (As an adolescent told me in the mid-1960s when I asked him why he wanted to know French, Tongànà mo hingà yângâ ti français apè, mo kè zo apè Tf you don't know the French language, you aren't a human being')12. Of course, some children would have acquired Sango as their first language because of their linguistic environment. But some of these, in acquiring French, would have made it their primary language, remaining bilingual and switching to Sango for comradeship, intimacy, and so forth.

The testing of my predictions became impossible with independence, when dramatic sociolinguistic changes took place, but even in 1972 when I was in Bangui, the French language was held in very high regard, it seemed to me (and much more than twenty years later). In any case, early statements about nativization in Sango were premature, because they were not based on any systematic study. And even a recent statement like the following is not fully accurate : Sango « peu à peu est devenue langue maternelle des urbains, quelle que soit leur ethnie d'origine » (Achard, P., 1993 : 40). The reasons become clear in the following exposition.

1 2 In compliance with international usage, the acute diacritic marks high tone, the grave low tone, and absence of a diacritic mid tone.

358 WILLIAM SAMARIN

Before reporting and commenting on what has been learned about the nativization of Sango in Bangui, proceeding chronologically, it would be well to consider the growth of the population of the city since its inception. (The most complete study of Bangui is that of Fr. Villien, Soumille, Vidal et Pirovano, 1990 ; see also Villien, Fr., 1985, 1987 ; for a survey of the city's history based on personal observations see Boulvert, Y., 1989 ; and Adrien-Rongier, M.-Fr., 1981 is a sociological study). See Table 1 for a detailed chronology and Figure 1 for a log of the population. The census of 1988 enumerated 433,333 individuals ; when certain categories of people are eliminated (e.g. prisoners, etc.), the resident population might be considered to be 425,000, of whom 27,000 were born outside Bangui and 244,000 in the city. Of those bom outside Bangui slightly over a quarter (25.8 %) had lived in the city for less than nine years. (These recent arrivals tend to be students, formally employed, and are unmarried : for example, 66.1 % of them considered themselves literate ; 24.5 had had secondary and higher education ; 51.2 % were in the formal workforce). Of the 64.7 % of the population fifteen years of age or younger, 43.1 % were bom in Bangui. But of those 15-24 in age 68.7 % gave their place of birth the eighth Préfecture (i.e., Kémo-Ibingui) of the country : that is, central RCA. Like most cities in predominantly rural countries, Bangui is youthful : in 1988 55.3 % were twenty and younger, 30.3 % were under ten.

Although the nativization of a pidgin has been considered to take place slowly over a generation or more, in the case of Sango it is quite possible that a number of children were learning it as at least one of their first languages soon after it became stabilized (that is, passed from a jargon to a language). They would have been the offspring of local women who had established unions with men from other parts of Africa in the employ of Europeans. Where men settled for several years, as many did, it was even more likely that more permanent unions came into being. As we see in the next section, native speakers were certainly growing up in the 1930s. But this matter is discussed below (and see W. J., Samarin, 1989a).

NATIVIZATION OF SANGO IN BANGUI

In what follows, the nativization of Sango is documented from information that comes from a study undertaken in 1958, the census of 1988, and two sets of interviews and one poll. Since it is desirable to explain shift and not merely document it, data from the census are analyzed with respect to a number of variables : namely, (1) age and place of birth, (2) gender, (3) place of residence by arrondissement, (4) ethnicity, and (5) education.

Survey in 1958

The first report of a native speaker of Sango is for the year 1958, at which time was discovered a young man — aged twenty-two, born in Bangui, employed in an office — who claimed to know only Sango and French


(Jacquot, A., 1961 : 163). This was among 1,412 persons who were interviewed in ten « villages » in the northern part of the District Urbain on the road to Damara (the furthest village in my estimation about fifteen kilometers from the commercial center of the city)13. This was an ethnically homogeneous area, according to Jacquot, most of the people being speakers of four languages of the Gbaya-Ngbaka-Manza group, of whom most were born in the interior and already knew Sango when they came to Bangui. Undoubtedly, more native speakers of Sango might have been found in the « quartiers modernes » near the center of the city. Indeed, at the Protestant mission near the Cathedral in 1962 I tape-recorded the speech of two adolescent girls, still in school, both Protestants, whose native language was Sango. The parents of one of them were both Gbaya ; the mother of the other was also Gbaya, but her father was French.

The Census of 1988

The census of 1988 included three questions on language. They are numbered here for convenience : 1. Langue parlée par la personne durant sa première enfance [what I am calling the native language], 2. 'Oui' si la personne parle sango, 'non' si la personne ne parle pas sango. 3. Une autre langue parlée par la personne.

It is the first that concerns us with respect to nativization, because in Bangui virtually everyone — except foreigners and recent immigrants, of course — would know Sango even if they came from the interior of the country14. Bangui is divided into eight arrondissements. Although there is virtually no difference between males and females for all of Bangui (97.5 vs 97.9 % respectively), in this first arrondissement there are several quartier where more women than men speak Sango : e.g., 82.0 vs 78 % in 'Neuf Villas', 79.0 vs 53.0 % in 'Cité UDEA', and in several of the military camps. Mixed marriages probably explain these differences, about which more is said below15.

1 3 It is significant that in 1958 one could still imagine the inhabitations very near Bangui as being villages. Indeed, a history of Bangui reveals how long Bangui itself was considered hardly more than a agglomeration of villages. 1 4 The census confirms this assumption on my part. From a total of 433,333 persons interviewed for the census in 1988 about 425,000 were eligible for analysis (and with respect to some analyses in this work somewhat less). Those who answered yes to question (2) represented 97.8 % of 423,960 persons, the figure dropping to 82.0 % in the first arrondissement, where I would expect most of the 'foreigners' to live. 15 Among all children six years of age and younger (N = 334,905) 98.4 % speak — but are not necessarily native speakers of — Sango. Of the 243,602 born in Bangui a surprising 4,144 (that is, 1.7 %) claim not to speak Sango at all. As might be expected, knowledge of Sango increases with number of years of residence in Bangui : of 127,569 persons who had lived in Bangui for

360 WILLIAM SAMARIN

If, on the other hand, Sango is named as the language acquired in earliest childhood — at the time when the acquisition of linguistic competence is occurring — we take that to he the first language learned (that which Calvet refers to as langue maternelle [1981]) : the person is therefore Sangophone in my terminology, and one for whom Sango can be said to he creolized in a sociolinguistic sense. It is quite possible, of course, that a child — even in Bangui — could learn another language at this time, becoming in some sense and to some degree bilingual. But this does not appear to be common at all among those studied for me by bilingual Central African assistants (see below). Native speakers of Sango made up 29.4 % of the population of Bangui in 198816.

Age and place of birth As might be expected, those who were born in Bangui are more inclined

to be Sangophone : i.e., 41.7 %. But ethnicity makes a difference (as will be seen again below). By comparison, Bangui-horn speakers of Gbaya represent 17.4 % of the population, of Banda 12.6 %, of Ngbandi 9.1 %, and Ngbaka/Gbanziri 8.5 %. (In this work the latter two ethnolinguistic riverine groups are combined for the sake of convenience and Yakoma refers henceforth to all the varieties of Ngbandi in the country. Speakers of Sango and at least one other language are in this work called allophones).

As one might also expect, the percentage of native speakers of Sango among those fifteen years of age and younger is considerable : namely, 42.1 %. Moreover, there is a clear inverse relation between age and nativization, almost on a straight line, as seen in Figure 2.

Gender Gender in itself is not a significant variable for the whole population : that

is, women do not appear to be in the vanguard of creolization. Indeed, among some samples of the population there are more male native speakers of Sango

nine years, 99.4 knew Sango ; but even among those who had lived there only one year (N = 7,183) 91.4% did. 1 6 In all the urban centers of the country in 1988, whose total number of inhabitants was 913,439, twenty percent of these, according to the census, gave Sango as their first language. Since the « centres urbains » were not identified or characterized, we can conclude that Bangui was included in this figure. In any case, since Bangui's population was 431,000 at that time, the remaining 482,000 'urban' inhabitants would have to be divided among not more than ten centers — in my opinion. It is unlikely that any is as populous as 48,000. Besides, since virtually all of these rural towns — despite their pretentious appellation — are in ethnolinguistically homogeneous areas where languages and varieties of the Banda and Gbaya families are spoken, it is more than reasonable to suppose that most of the native speakers of Sango would be from other parts of the country — especially Bangui itself. Sango is therefore still far from being the most common mother tongue of large towns in the 'provinces'. The analysis of the data was provided by Mark Karan, a member of SIL, but the interpretation is my own.


than female. (There are, however, some gender-related linguistic differences, partially reported in Samarin, W. J., 1995). Of 26,922 Sangophones whose gender is known in the census, 50.3 % are male and 49.6 % female. However, gender does make a difference when one considers the ages of native speakers. Thus, among the Sangophone born between 1936 and 1945 (N = 615), 54.3 % are male and 45.7 % female. Put very simply, this would mean that in quite a few households sons would have grown up not knowing the language of both or one of their parents, and their sisters would have. If mixed — that is, interethnic — marriages are adduced to explain this shift, they do not clearly do so in my own more recent investigations (see below)17. It should also be noted that before independence Sango was the lingua franca of those in service (pronounced sàràwîsi in the 1950s), that is, of those working for whites. It was therefore a language of upward mobility, if not even prestige (although lower than the almost inaccessible French ; see Samarin, 1966). Any kind of salaried position was sought by Central Africans, and almost all of them, as I saw in the 1950s, were held by males. It was not only the assurance of money at the end of the month that made service desirable : having a job meant that one also had a patron. Imposed on a white male, this role opportunistically assumed the significance for Central Africans similar to that of one's kôyà 'maternal uncle'. Having a patron meant that one was privileged in many ways.

Place of residence (by arrondissement) Since place of residence is linked to ethnicity — people tending to live in

neighborhoods with co-ethnics — we analyze the distribution of Sangophonie by arrondissement18. The percentages of Sangophones inhabiting the different

1 7 Since patterns of language acquisition in a multilingual setting are variable within a given society and even differ for members of a single household (as found also by Owens, J., 1995a), we have to assume that some of those whom were are considering native speakers of Sango on the basis of the information provided in the census might have started out learning their parents' language and then adopted Sango as their only language when they began to go to school. Before independence, boys, moreover, were more likely to go to school and remain longer. (University students are still almost exclusively male). Sango is the lingua franca of the school grounds, where children learn (if they have not already done so), improve, and learn to prefer Sango. One of my assistants with a university education was one of those Central Africans who had given up their ethnic language for Sango. Although he lived in Arrondissement I, near the main road and in the neighborhood called Castor, in a household where the Gbaya of Bossangoa was spoken by members of his family, including his mother, he used nothing but Sango. 18 On the other hand, when we examine the highest and the lowest percentages of native speakers of different ethnic languages (also known as langues vernaculaires [e.g., Calvet, L.-J., 1981 : 68]), there does seem to be a correlation between density of population and percentage of Sangophones. Here again we find variation between different arrondissements. More cannot be said at this time, because the statistics have not been fully studied. — Around 1981 there were only four arrondissements, and at that time, if not to this day, they were simply police districts (Adrien-Rongier, M.-Fr., 1981).

362 WILLIAM SAMARIN

arrondissements are seen in Table 2, where the average for all eight of them is 30.2 % ; hut when the quartiers are selected, the percentage rises to an average of 42.4 % for the eight arrondissements (see Tables 3 et 4). Arrondissement IV has the highest percentage of Sangophones even though its population of 1,008 is at only 71.8 p/ha. The high figure for Arrondissement I can be correlated with social variables. Arrondissement I seems to contain people who are French or alien by birth, 35-44 years of age (12.1 % compared with Bangui's average of 8.3 %), a few more people of ages 10-14 (16.1 % v,s Bangui's 12.9 %), among whom there are slightly more males than females, are above average in education, are part of the formal work force, and tend to be married. It might be noted also that in spite of the high number of Sangophones, 18.0 % of all those in Bangui who do not speak Sango are found in this arrondissement.

We can, however, compare what A. Jacquot learned in 1958 (see above) with what is found in the census of 1988. Of his quartiers the only ones for which I have information are found in Arrondissement IV. The census data reveal that Sango was named as the native language most frequently in seven out of the nine quartiers of this arrondissment, ranked here according to which ones had the highest number of native speakers of Sango : Ouham 1, Votombo (if this is Jacquot's Gotombo), Gobongo 1, Lando, Dedengue 1, Lipia 1 (the numerals following the name are part of the official name since there are two or more quartiers of the same name). Obviously, a major shift had taken place in thirty years.

Ethnicity There are interesting differences between those born in different parts of

the country, a fact that correlates with ethnicity, but correlations are not easily found in the census of 1988. We have learned, nonetheless, that 30.8 % of the inhabitants of Bangui who cited Préfecture 5 (Nana-Mambéré) were Sangophone, and 24.6% from Préfecture 3 (Haute-Sangha), both in the west, areas where Gbayas are found in the greatest numbers. The shift to Sango among these people in Bangui is considerable19.

Continuing the use of préfecture s to determine the percentages of native speakers of other languages than Sango, we can consider Table 5. This presents the percentages of those who were horn outside Bangui correlated with another ethnic language.

Table 6 reveals that among 307 subjects whose parents were of the same ethnicity about 31 % were Sangophone. The table also reveals significant differences in monolingualism (i.e., sangophonie) and biiinguaiism among the different ethnic groups20. The highest figure for biiinguaiism, 93.7 %, is for the

1 9 On the other hand, the use of Sango even as a lingua franca among the most western Gbaya, I have it on good authority, was quite limited until recently. 2 0 I was a witness to the way a child was becoming bilingual in 1991, when I spent two nights in the home of a Protestant pastor in Mbaiki. He and his wife had no other language than Sango in common. Their son, in the process of acquiring language but already able to speak as well as


category of 'Muslim', many of whom, I would assume, are recent immigrants. The figure for Yakoma bilingualism is understandably high, given what we learned above, but the figure for Gbaya bilingualism is surprising. I suspect that the families were also recent immigrants to Bangui.

Hypothesizing that there would he a difference between riverine and non-riverine ethnic groups (with respect to the Ubangi river, of course), data for Yakoma and Ngbaka were grouped in one cohort and, in another, Banda and Gbaya. The motivation for this hypothesis was (1) that the Ngbaka were the original inhabitants of the area around Bangui and (2) that all the Ngbandi-speaking peoples in French territory, since they were first encountered by whites, live along the Ubangi river and its tributaries21. They therefore probably had settled quite early in Bangui as the result of their involvement in the colonization of the territory on the part of the French (Samarin, W. J., 1989a)22. Figure 3 reveals a neat cline in the percentage of Banda and Gbaya who were born in Bangui but did not acquire Sango as native language. But the recent children of these ethnic groups have been acquiring Sango more and more as their native language. See below.

A closer look at the data collected from Yakoma parents and adult kin of 189 preschool children, from three to six years of age, proves rewarding23. These adults were interviewed by a young adult female, herself of Yakoma ethnicity, in a quartier whose inhabitants were predominantly of this ethnic group. Of these children 59 % — averaging boys and girls —

understand, was addressed in Sango by his Banda father and in Nzakara by his mother. (Although I did not observe code-switching on the part of the mother, it would be reasonable to suppose, in view of what I know about Central African life, that she was not absolutely consistent in using her own language with him). A common explanation for having a child learn a yanga ti kodoro « village language » is to make it possible for them to talk with their grandparents. 2 1 This is my own view, based on my own research. A different one is expressed by M.-Fr. Adrien-Rongier, who says that « les Ndre [belonging to the Banda ethnolinguistic family, earlier known as Ndry] ... sont toujours appelés Tes premiers habitants de Bangui' et, à ce titre, continuent à jouir d'un statut particulier, étant notamment exemptés du paiement de l'impôt » (1981 : 103). Compare the following : « ...les Ndrys doivent fournir des vivres et sont exempts de l'impôt ou plutôt ce sera leur impôt...» (Letter from R.P. Sallaz to R.P. Rémy, Mission St. Paul, 4 May 1903 [Archives of the Congrégation du Saint-Esprit, Boîte 182, Dossier A, V]). 2 2 Victor Liotard, a French officer in the 1890s, also mentions that Bangui became the haven to which Yakoma came when fleeing those they had mistreated while serving under the French. Paris, Archives Nationales Section Outre-Mer, Papiers Liotard 213 Mi, 2, Journal 28 août 1891 au mai 1892 (« notes recopiées par la suite par un autre [...] ») ; 213 Mi 2(2), « Notes pour le rapport de fin de campagne (postérieur à 1894) ». For more on Liotard see Mazières 1982. 2 3 The nature of a Central African household being what it is, a grandparent or aunt, for example, can be expected to be as competent as a parent to make judgments about linguistic competence ; but see also below.

364 WILLIAM SAMARIN

were said to be competent in the ethnic language24. Apart from the bias of some fathers (for which see below), there are two reasons for accepting the adults' evaluation : (1) the interviewer, as part of the event, tested each child by speaking to him or her in Yakoma to make her own assessment of competence ; (2) as one would expect, competence increases with age. However, the number of those who were highly competent is conditioned by gender : 63 % for boys (N = 86) and 55 % (N = 98) for girls. This gender difference among the Yakoma is confirmed by the difference found among 134 persons between the ages of six and fifty-four of this màra « tribe » from whom in 1991 I elicited and tape-recorded voluntary samples of extemporaneous Sango. Whereas 35 % of the males claimed to he fluent in their native language, only 22 % of the females did so, a matter taken up in the next paragraph (see Table 7).

Although information obtained from human beings must be tested for reliability whenever possible, we are justified in being rather confident that there is a real gender difference among the Yakoma. GIRLS, NOT BOYS, ARE MORE INCLINED TO BE SANGOPHONE. T h e fo l lowing explanat ions are to b e considered. (1) It is quite possible that the fifteen-year presidency of André Kolingba, himself of this ethnic extraction, raised the sensibility of many of his co-ethnics, and Yakoma became emblematic of their solidarity. This hypothesis seems to be confirmed by P. Wald, who has undertaken research with the Yakoma youth of Bangui, who says that the Yakoma « développe une représentation diglossique de sa propre identité linguistique, basée d'une part sur la continuité ressentie et revendiquée entre ces deux langues [i.e., Sango and Yakoma] [...] » (1986 : 674, italics added). (2) It proved rewarding, therefore, to compare the evaluations of fathers and mothers. When 136 parents — excluding other adult kin in this instance — were interviewed about their children's competence in Yakoma, 74 % of the fathers (N = 38) rated their children as fluent speakers of Yakoma whereas only 58 % of the mothers (N = 98) did. It is quite possible, of course, that these figures reflect a bias on the part of both parents, not only of fathers.

In any case, there is linguistic evidence to support the claim that the Yakoma of Bangui constitute a speech community. For example, from preliminary analyses of the linguistic and sociolinguistic conditioning of the distribution of the variants of the variable {tl}, the preposition ' o f , it is clear that some variants occur more frequently among the Yakoma than, for example, the Gbaya. From extemporaneous speech of boys and girls tape-recorded between 1988 and 1994 it was found that there was a marked preference for the variant fRJ, a rather recent innovation (when compared to the

2 4 Subjects interviewed were given a choice of four degrees of competence : nzoni im'ngi « very good », nzoni « good », nzonf kété « somewhat good » (literally, 'good little'), hi'ngà apè « don't kno ». The third degree included ma kété kété « understand just a bit » (i.e., to obey commands, etc., but not to speak).


language I knew in the 1950s)25. It consists of a high pitch — or rising, when the preceding is low or mid — on the preceding vowel or pitch-carrying consonant. (The variations are numerous, but need not be discussed here). The instances of /R/ among the twenty-one Gbaya and eighteen Yakoma children between the ages of twelve and fourteen (from whom 435 instances or possible instances of {tf} occurred in Gbaya speech and 385 instances in Yakoma speech) are compared in Table 8.

Education According to the census, education appears to correlate with being

Sangophone, it being assumed, of course, that the education of a native speaker of Sango is related to the upward mobility of the family26. (1) Sangophones are those who tend to stay in school longer. Thus, whereas only 25.9 % of all those fifteen years of age and older were still in school in 1988, 35.0 % of Sangophones were. (2) Grades show a similar effect : of those 5-24 in age who had reached a grade level commensurate with their age (i.e., 'up to grade') 39.0 % are Sangophone. (3) In the whole population of Bangui, among those twenty-five years and older 31.2 % have secondary or higher education ; among these, 21.0 % are Sangophone. (4) Literacy, involving only French and Sango, is higher among Sangophones, representing 70 % of the population of Bangui. (5) Although Sangophones comprise 29.4 % of the population of Bangui, they constitute 28.2 % of those who are literate. By comparison, allophone persons of Gbaya and Banda ethnicity are correlated with lower percentages : (1) 18.5 % of those with Gbaya as native language were in school and 11.8 % of the Banda ; (2) Gbaya and Banda are below the average in being 'up to grade' : 23.8 and 16.7 respectively ; (3) 22.7 % of the Gbaya and 15.4 % of the Banda had a secondary education or more ; (4) 28.2 % of the Gbaya were literate, 22.4 % of the Banda ; (5) whereas the Gbaya and Banda comprise 24.5 % of the population of Bangui, they account for 30.1 % of the city's illiterates.

Leaving the census data of 1988, we turn to what I learned during ten months of field work in 1988, 1991, 1992, and 1994, considering conclusions from two sets of interviews and one poll.

2 5 It is so recent, in fact, that when I described it and other variants to an audience of Central African linguists in 1988, their response was incredulity ; one of them said that these were just mistakes made by children who had not yet learned Sango correctly (see also Samarin, W. J.,1993). 2 6 It must be understood, however, that the following correlations are based on a rough reading of the tables and the analysis constitutes a 'fair first-cut' at the problem. For more precise correlations, one would have to analyze data with respect to families, and so forth.

366 WILLIAM SAMARIN

Preschool children, 1991-1994

Parents and a few other adult kin — to the number of 1,065 — of 1,123 preschool children of five different ethnic groups were interviewed. (Naturally, mixed marriages were not included in this investigation). The average of those who did not know an ethnic language in this population and were therefore Sangophone is 34.6 % : for boys the average is 36.0 %, for girls 33.2 %. There are differences, however, between different ethnic groups and for different ages (see Table 9). There is, for example, a dramatic difference between the Banda children and Yakoma children : 47.7 % of one cohort of Banda children are ignorant of their ancestral language (an average of 46.6 for two cohorts from different quartiers) v.v only 81.3 % of the Yakoma children. In other words, among the Banda 52.3 % are Sangophone, but among the Yakoma only 18.6%. This finding confirms what was learned from the census about the level of language maintenance among the Yakoma27. One factor that may play a role in language maintenance among the Yakoma is intra-ethnic social networking. It was found in interviewing 108 children from the ages o f t e n to fifteen about their best friends or buddies that whereas 36 % of the Gbaya subjects had co-ethnic buddies, 55.5 % of the Yakoma did28. Of course, social networking may itself be one of the consequences of residence patterns.

Incidentally, the considerable difference between the two Gbaya cohorts seen in Table 9, assuming that the two Gbaya interviewers were themselves not responsible, is possibly accounted for by either the length of residence on the part of the parents or place of residence in the city — or, of course, both factors. It is to be noted, in any case, that even though the two populations differ in number (another significant factor) the percentages for girls is the same.

Looking at other data from the same study, we find what seems to be evidence of possibly even greater loss among Banda children. When competence of the first two degrees is correlated with age, we learn — as one would expect among children just acquiring language of any kind — that competence reported at age four is better than at age three. But then it surprisingly drops off again and stays low even until age eight, the age of the eldest of the children who had not been to school. This would appear to reflect the loss of competence in the ethnic language as the children moved from the socializing influence of mostly adults to mostly that of peers and slightly older

2 7 Since Yakoma is the base-language for Sango (or, in the parlance of those who study pidgins, its lexifier) and since there is a certain amount (perhaps quite a bit) of code-mixing and code-switching among this ethnolinguistic group, it is possible that reports of language usage are less reliable than they are among other groups.

Ehcitation was simple and explicit in Sango, translating freely into English as 'Who is the buddy [mba, or the French word camarade] with whom you run around with ? What is his/her màra ?' This study (or experiment), in spite of what it reveals, is faulted because I failed to learn whether or not the subjects were native speakers of Sango.


kin — the latter being for the most part fta, which includes both siblings and cousins. By contrast, the percentage of reported competence increases with age in the Yakoma population. These differences might, of course, be considered trivial if it were the case, for example, that there were more adults, and especially grandparents, in the Yakoma households than in the Banda households29.

Among 58 children in the grade level called cours moyen deux, ranging from 10 to 14 (but occasionally to 15 and even 16) years of age, at École Centre Mixte where I interviewed 27 boys and 31 girls, those who claimed to know only Sango and no ethnic language made up exactly 50 % of the total. For more information on this school see below.

Church attendants, 1994

For the months of July-September, 1994, I can report on language competence among 7,956 persons who participated in an informal poll (by raising their hands or standing up) undertaken on my behalf by the pastors during thirteen Sunday-morning Protestant church services in different parts of the city (see Table 10). As might be expected, the percentage of those who are Sangophone is inverse to that of age. The differences between the genders — with the higher percentages of Sangophones among females and especially adults — cannot be explained at the moment, because I could not accurately locate each church in the city, nor did I have information about the ethnic constituency of each church. It should be noted that whereas 25.5 % of the adult males in this population reported themselves as being Sangophone, for the census 54.3 % of those between the ages of 49 and 58 claimed to be so (see above).

Here, then, is a summary of the percentages of native speakers of Sango in Bangui arrived at in one way or another for different kinds of populations, as described above. All percentages for the year 1988 are based on the census.

1988 22.3% of the population. 1988 41.7% of those born in Bangui. 1988 30.2% of the population of Arrondissement I. 1988 42.9% of those 15 years of age and younger. 1988 68.1 % of those 25 years and younger. 1988-1992 35.4% of 'young people'.

2 9 Although it has been said that the interviews were primarily with parents, it should be understood that the children of Bangui do not grow up in a nuclear family of the kind that is characteristic of western industrialized societies. The household — and especially the urban household — almost always includes close relatives of all kinds and of all ages. It is not uncommon, I have been told by Central Africans, for there to be about twenty or even more close-knit kin in a household, the living quarters consequently consisting of more than one unit. On one occasion, while chatting with several friendly pre-adolescents along the street in Bangui, one of them, gesturing to the four women nearby, called them âmàmâ tf i « our mothers/aunts ».

3 6 8 WILLIAM SAMARIN

1994 1994 1994

1992 1992-1994

30.5% of those 10-15 years of age in one school.. 34.6% of preschool children. 31.2% of Protestant adults. 48.7% of Protestant older adolescents. 69.2% of Protestant young adolescents.

EXPLANATION

A commonly cited explanation for the nativization of a lingua franca is that it occurs in mixed marriages : that is, when children, for whatever reason in the family, learn neither of the parents' languages and adopt the community's lingua franca, a pidgin, for example. For example, Kituba (also known as Monokutuba and Kikongo véhiculaire) « has become the first language of a limited number of young people as a consequence of intertribal marriage » (Polomé, E., 1986 : 397). Mixed marriages are cited also by Sankoff as one of the reasons for the acquisition of native speakers by a pidgin (without suggesting what the others might be) in the context of saying that this process is « generally the result of dramatic social changes in which people's native languages fall into disuse on the part of their speakers, or at least are not transmitted to succeeding generations. It can result, for example, from intermarriage of people who have no language but the pidgin in common, as is the case with Tok Pisin » (1977 : 122 ; and by Muysken P., & Smith, N., 1995 : 3). While social changes are reasonably invoked in explaining language shift, the reasons given by Sankoff are not sufficiently comprehensive nor constraining. Children may choose quite early in their lives to learn a pidgin even when their parents use a common ethnic language. 'Disuse' might characterize a large number of families in an urban center without characterizing certain parts of them or certain families. The fact of not transmitting the adults' language, on the other hand, is unquestionably important. By this phrase, of course, we only mean that in the home environment not enough of the adult language is spoken or as much required of the child in verbal exchanges that the child can acquire normal competence, as in my own case, since I did not learn to speak Russian although both my parents were less competent in English than in Russian.

Although it was understandable that familial linguistic diversity could be expected to be an ideal womb in which native speakers would be born (and was found to be so in Bangui), we find that nativization has been taking place in Bangui to a considerable degree also in ethnically homogeneous households30. (And it should he noted that Tok Pisin is being nativized even in one rural

30 I am unable to make any generalizations about what languages were used and spoken in unions of Central African women and whites. In the only one I knew personally in the last decade, French was used in Bangui. Any study of them would have to take into consideration how poorly they were viewed by other Europeans (see, for example, the novel by Ipeko-Etomane [1981]).


village in Papua New Guinea [Kulick, D., 1992]). In this section is presented the analyses of data of different kinds with respect to language and marriage.

1. Random population of Bangui The following analysis is based on data my assistants and I collected from

1988 to 1994 for 580 persons, only a small sample of all whose extemporaneous speech was tape-recorded, about whom information was available about the ethnicity of parents. Due to field work problems beyond my control subjects were chosen wherever they became available ; most of them are young. The 104 subjects (aged 4 to 29 for males and 6 to 19 for females) analyzed in Table 11 are native speakers of Sango. The analysis contradicts one's expectations : the percentage of native speakers in mixed marriages is actually lower than in the other kind and greater for females than males.

2. Interviews with children in cours moyen deux When, on the other hand, age is controlled, we find that indeed there are

more native speakers of Sango in mixed marriages : there are more Sangophone children in mixed marriages than there used to be.

Interethnic marriages, however, do not constitute an invariable independent variable. Interviews with 263 children still in cours moyen deux in six locations for the purpose of determining their inventory of languages reveal that the percentage of those who are Sangophone ranges from 85.0 % to 40.0 % (see Table 12). Four of these were schools and two were Protestant churches. At the latter, children of this age group were invited to meet with me after the Sunday morning service. At each of the six sites the children were interviewed individually and rewarded with a balloon. The table reveals, in the first place, that the percentage of mixed marriages varies from place to place. However, they are to some extent consistent with (or predictable from) the sites. Castor, for example, is in Arrondissement 1, not far from the city center, an area of great ethnic diversity. At Boy Rabe, on the other hand, one is in a quartier with less ethnic diversity and high percentage of Gbaya and Manza. Again, ethnic diversity might be expected at the École Centre and a higher percentage of children of mixed ethnicity, because it draws pupils from many places in the city. What is surprising is that the same is not true of the equally prestigious École St. Jean, that is also in the heart of the city : only 29.6 % of the 64 children interviewed were of mixed ethnicity. (In spite of its name, St. Jean is, of course, a state school).

Variation in mixed marriages is found to correlate among other things with ethnicity ; this in turn with being bilingual in Sango and in the language of one of the parents. At École Sao — in Ouango, upriver of the city, almost a suburb — 33.3 % of the children's mothers and 45.0 % of the fathers were of Yakoma ethnic. The next important ethnic group were Banda (including Langbasi and Ngbugu) : 33.3 % of the mothers and 35.0 % of the fathers. Together, these two ethnic groups were found in 80.0 % of the fathers and 75.0 % of the mothers. Although 69 % of the children of mixed ethnicity are

370 WILLIAM SAMARIN

Sangophone, this figure is not much above what is found in other circumstances (see above). It is striking, therefore, to find almost the same percentage of mixed marriages at École St. Jean, but a smaller percentage of Sangophones (52.6 %). What accounts for the latter fact is that children of riverine ethnicity (i.e., found along the Ubangi upriver of the capital) are those among whom most biiinguaiism is found. Of the 47 children at St. Jean both or one of whose parents were Banda, Ngbaka, or Yakoma, 53.19 % were Sangophone, but the figures differ for each ethnic group : Banda, 66.6 % ; Ngbaka, 9.09 % ; Yakoma, 46.15 %.

In Table 13 is displayed the analysis of which parental language is learned by children in mixed marriages. One sees that the father's language is preferred to that of the mother's and that males are more inclined to know their father's language than the females. No one reported knowing the language of both parents. (Figures may not match others because of insufficient data in some cases). Table 14 shows the distribution of Sangophones, bilinguals, and trilinguals in two age groups.

It is worth noting that mixed marriages do not seem to be the most important factor in accounting for the use of Bambara as first language in one Malian city. Although it was found in a study undertaken in 1967 that among 2,325 pupils from the cinquième to the neuvième 69 % named Bambara as the only African language they knew, 71 % of 1,281 who provided information about marriage had parents who were both of Bambara ethnicity (48.2 %) or one parent (22.9 %) who was (Brauner, S., 1972). Mixed marriages among the other ethnic groups was about equal to that of intra-ethnic marriages according to my calculations. (Brauner does not provide the ethnicity of the spouse in mixed marriages).

Interethnic households were undoubtedly coincident with the birth of Sango itself, as was suggested above. That is, at the same time that the first African foreigners arrived and began to jargonize in one or more varieties of the Ngbandi-Yakoma language they also began to acquire indigenous women with whom they cohabited. Out of these unions, by no means incidental ones, came without a doubt a certain number of children.

I say that these unions were not necessarily en passage because of the historical record. Georges Bricusse, a Belgian officer, for example, noted in his diary in 1895 that when a Hausa soldier returned from a skirmish, there was a « very touching scene » when his wife (« femme ») welcomed him back with tears in her eyes (Salmon, P., 1966 : 123).

Although this account might he considered only an ironic one because of the sentiment expressed, Belgian and French militiamen acquired 'wives' in large numbers. In 1889 Veistroffer bought, it is reported, female slaves (as they were called) on the Ubangi River from convoys and villages for his men (Veistroffer [1933] : 162). In some individual cases, of course, gifts were made to privileged workers, as when Colrat de Montrozier handed over a girl slave who had been given to him by a chief to one of his Senegalese militiamen (Colrat de Montrozier, 1902 : 79). Later, a lieutenant in the eastern part of the


Haut-Oubangui reported, « I went to see the Sultan [not identified] day-before-yesterday, ate with him, and arranged in an amicable manner several points having to do with the creation of a market [and] the sending of women for riflemen ». On 4 May 1903 a priest at Mission St. Paul notes in a letter : « Défense aux miliciens d'avoir plus d'une femme » (see note 21). Since the forces of the Congo Free State were much more numerous than those of the French, and since both the French and Belgians, as well as Dutch traders, were in constant contact with riverine peoples, the number of unions that arose by one means or another might well have been more than insignificant.

However, one would only be speculating in considering the kind of pidgin Sango the offspring of these unions might have talked while Sango was emerging as a stable lingua franca. All that I have sought to establish is that MIXED MARRIAGES ARE NOT A RECENT PHENOMENON. That they had something to do with the development of Sango in its early history is, on the other hand, not terribly unreasonable, Nor is it impossible that there may have been a few persons for whom Sango was their native language in Bangui quite early in this century.

Before leaving this topic, we should consider another aspect of the history of the colonization where Sango-speaking children were involved. It is a fact that very early in the occupation of the territory the militiamen — and later soldiers — were served by boys (i.e., servants) who were recruited in one way or another among the local populations. As early as 1888, the year following the first penetration by Europeans up the Ubangi River beyond what came to be known as Bangui, when Alphonse Van Gele — the Belgian officer who made this expedition — made a recapitulation of his personnel, there were twelve among the 91 in all who were identified as « liberated » (i.e., slaves), of whom six are small boys. (As noted above, Sango used to be referred to as sango ti tùrûgù 'soldier's Sango'. An elderly Gbeya pastor I knew in that period had been a soldier's boy in his childhood.)

And here is a report just ten years later by a French doctor in Bangui, all the more significant because it refers to a patois, which is undoubtedly Sango.

Le 2° boy, Mbili, est un Sangho [sic] [i.e., someone from around Mobaye] de 8 à 9 ans également [like his other boy] qui passe son temps à causer, à rire et à manger. C'est lui mon véritable domestique ici ; malheureusement il n'a jamais été boy et ne comprend pas un mot de français ; je suis obligé de lui bredouiller le patois de la rivière. Il est très gentil physiquement, très doux, n'a aucun tatouage. Il fait ma chambre, me lave mon linge et surveille mes affaires, car comme il ne connaît les blancs que depuis un mois il n'est pas encore trop roublard ; aussi j'ai confiance en lui et je lui laisse la garde de ma case, quand je m'absente31.

31 loseph Briand, 16 Septemberl898, family archives. I am grateful to a grand-daughter for the privilege of examining some of these papers. See also Dias-Briand (1982).

372 WILLIAM SAMARIN

CONCLUSIONS

That almost everyone in Bangui speaks Sango is understandable. Although French is the language of education, the real lingua franca in this linguistically heterogeneous city is Sango. What is even more significant is the number of persons for whom it is the native language, even though it is substantially the same for communicative purposes (that is, linguistically) as it was forty or more years ago — if not longer. In other words, the language itself has not yet changed in response to its greater range of use since the time when it was exclusively a medium of linguistic exchange between people who had no language in common. (This is not to say that changes have not occurred. Of course, they have : see, for example, Samarin, W. J., 1997b on contractions).

Nativization in Sango, however, is extremely variable, depending to different degrees on place of residence in the city, age, education, and ethnicity. Place of residence, but especially that of quartier, is undoubtedly not a pure variable. Each quartier is also made up of different numbers of inhabitants, differing in ethnicity, education, and occupation. In an area where there are many inhabitants belonging to the same ethnic group — which one might call a critical mass — one would expect more language maintenance, the opposite of shift. This expectation is indeed confirmed by the data for sixteen quartiers. However, ethnicity alone would appear to be an important factor among those who, presumably, are more recent Central African inhabitants than the Ngbaka and Yakoma32. Ethnicity, therefore, deserves further attention.

The role of ethnicity in language maintenance and language shift is a function of the common attitudes shared by a group. Language can be — and frequently is — a symbol of community. Sango, it was observed above, is the language that sets Central Africans apart from Africans of other political states ; indeed, it sets the Central African Republic apart from every other one. Among Central Africans, French is now, as much as it was in the colonial era, the white man's language33. But on another level — the international one — French unites other francophones in francophonie. That THERE IS NO

32 In the rural areas, naturally, the number of those not knowing Sango would be higher. For example, among the 2,017 persons inhabiting four villages within two kilometers of each other in the northwest corner of the country, about 535 km from Bangui, near the borders of Chad and Cameroun, 17.4 % did not know Sango in 1988 according to the census of that year. Among the women, 21.5 % did not ; among the men, 13.3 %. This is more than I would have expected, given the fact that there had been at Nzoro a Protestant mission, which had a medical clinic, since 1950 if not earlier and that all but Estella Myers, who served there for some time, used Sango exclusively. Miss Myers used Kanre, a dialect from near Bozoum and mutually intelligible with the Pana of the area in question. At the time I visited it in 1992 there was a large elementary school in Nzoro. 33 The impression one gets in listening to radio broadcasts in Sango is that French is even reprehensible. This attitude is conveyed, for example, in an old-fashioned pronunciation of the word : fàrânzi.


SIGNIFICANT SHIFT TOWARD FRENCH IN BANGUI is understandable therefore. How is it, therefore, that among the capital's inhabitants shift to Sango is greater in some than in other ethnic groups ?

The answer is, as always in explaining language shift, that THERE IS A SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS OF ETHNOLINGUISTIC DIVERSITY and SOME GROUPS HAVE A GREATER SENSE OF THEIR ETHNOLINGUISTIC IDENTITY than others. But first, it should be observed that ethnicity is a salient factor in the city34. That the nation's ethnolinguistic diversity is reflected in Bangui hardly needs documentation ; it is, in fact, more diverse, because people from other parts of Africa and abroad reside in the city in greater or smaller numbers. The census of 1988, indeed, provides, as we saw above, the numbers of persons speaking different first languages. All but the Ngbaka (and possibly some Banda), the original inhabitants of the site, are, of course, immigrants. However, given the fact that so many from the hinterlands came to Bangui, one would have thought that the number of Sangophones would be higher than it is in the older population. It is reported that Banda and Gbaya, for example, fleeing the obligatory collection of rubber sap came to Bangui in large numbers. Forced labor for les travaux publiques after the first world war for the building of roads and bridges and the Kongo Wara revolt of some of the Gbaya population in the west around 1930 increased the number of Manza and Gbaya (Lematomo, E., 1977 : 6-7, citing Kalck, P., 1959 as source)35. It took, as we see below, changes in both residence patterns and attitudes for Sango to become Bangui's dominant language, this fact leading to children learning it as their first language36.

34 Official policy ever since a decree on 27 luly 1966, however, prohibited « toute mention, dans les actes officiels ou sous seing privé, imprimés, formulaires administratifs ou privés, de race, de tribu ou d'ethnie » (quotation in Kalck, P., 1971 : 11). 35 M.-Fr. Adrien-Rongier, citing no source, says that the Gbaya of Bossangoa settled in what is now the Gbafio quartier in 1946, but were formerly in the « 'quartier Gbaya' ... à la périphérie du poste administratif et des concessions européennes » (1981 : 97). Its location is not given, but seems to be in the same general area. At the present time another area where many Gbaya are found is called Boeing, beyond the airport. 36 J.-P. Lebeufs unqualified declaration following a survey undertaken in 1950 that French at that time was the vehicular language of Bangui will be accepted by only the credulous (sans date, cited, in : Villien, Fr., 1987). I am reminded of the judge in Bossangoa in the 1950s later telling me from behind his desk, windows wide open to the verandahs at both sides of his huge colonial office, « Tout le monde parle français ». Except for a handful of employees in the administration and the private sector, I knew, virtually no one spoke French, and an important percentage of the 80,000 inhabitants of the District de Bossangoa did not even know Sango. The number of children in school was very small. Education in Oubangui-Chari was available to only a few. Here is a brief review of its history (RCA 1991). The first école primaire was created in Bambari in 1924, the second in Mbaiki in 1927, the third in Bangui in 1933. In Bangui also was created in 1942 the first école primaire supérieure cycle de trois ans, followed in the next year by the first école supérieure, but again in Bambari. And 1950 was the year when this latter

374 WILLIAM SAMARIN

Therefore, Banguissois have — or think they have — a fairly good idea where agglomerations of an ethnic group can be found, and people of all ages are quite knowledgeable about ethnicity in their personal experience. (1) As was noted briefly above, when 108 children between the ages of ten and fifteen were interviewed about who their friends were, every one of them could provide the name of the màra ('kind, ethnic group') of his or her friends. (2) Practically 100 % of about 1,500 persons from whom personal information was obtained when they were interviewed or when their speech was tape-recorded gave the name of their màra without hesitation. Rare was the individual — and always young, male, and educated — who asserted his being nothing more than a Central African. (3) Children of mixed marriages can identify the màra of their parents, being obliged on occasion to say, for example, Togolais or Camerounais. (4) When one hundred persons of Ngbaka ethnicity in one quartier were interviewed by a Central African in 1994, each one of them was able — although we had no way of confirming this — to name the ethnicity of all the families within a radius of forty to fifty meters around his or her place of residence. (5) Central Africans have made the claim to me and to other linguists that they can identify a person's màra by the way he or she speaks Sango.

At the conclusion of this work we have not arrived at an elegant and sophisticated explanation for shift to Sango in Bangui. Even if this were possible for anyone to achieve, it was not the principal goal of my research, which at the very beginning in 1987 was to study the linguistic consequences of the nativization (creolization) of Sango. Nonetheless, one has been introduced to some of the ways one might go about researching the subject. It has been demonstrated that while pursuing other goals a person can with a little extra effort and at not much expense learn a great deal. The most important lesson one should learn from this examination of the case of language shift in an African city — in which different kinds of figures have been arrived at — is that one is advised to be incredulous when presented by anyone with a single figure of the percentage of native speakers of a lingua franca where censuses alone do not provide all the data that are necessary (which is usually the case). These must be treated as careless, pretentious, or flippant observations. Impatiently, nonetheless, do we wait for other studies — more purposeful and thorough — on languages in Africa like Pidgin English and Wolof and Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea.

Finally, on the basis of this study one might be allowed to predict that in the next generation of people born in Bangui, virtually all of them will be native speakers of Sango, and very few of them will even know another Central

school became the Collège Normal. In the whole territory that year there were 134 public and private primary schools, but most of them ecclésiastiques. Of all the pupils only 165 had been entrés en sixième. Twelve years later the latter figure had risen to 450, at which time there were only ten instituteurs, and only six non-Europeans had been admis au deuxième baccalauréat (information obtained privately from the Ministry of Education, 12 July 1962).


African language. The prediction is made, because so many of the relatively few children who claimed competence in the language of one or both of their parents also informed me that most of the time THEY RESPONDED TO THEIR PARENTS IN SANGO when spoken to in the ethnic language. Many also informed me that their parents used both Sango and an ethnic language in speaking to them. In other words, both the claims and allegations of bilingualism and also the facts of language use at home lead to support the expectation of a dominantly Sango-speaking population in Bangui. Therefore, although it is not clear at all yet what the internal linguistic consequences of the nativization of Sango will be — in grammar and lexicon, in particular — the Sango of Bangui will certainly be more and more influenced by French, whether or not its speakers have any real competence in this language ; and those who do have speaking competence in French will engage in code-switching — itself a phenomenon that has linguistic consequences. A very different kind of Sango will emerge in one hundred years or less, and Central African French will also be different.

Références Bibliographiques ACHARD, P., 1993. La sociologie du langage, Paris : P.U.F. ADRIEN-RONGER, M.-Fr., 1981. Les kodro de Bangui : un espace urbain «oublié»,

Cahiers d'Etudes africaines, 81-83, XXI-1-3, 93-110. BOULEVERT, Y., 1989. Bangui 1889-1989, points de vue et témoignages : Ministère de

la Coopération et du Développement. BRAUNER, S., 1972. Structure ethnique et situation linguistique dans la région de

Ségou, Congrès international des Africanistes, deuxième session, Dakar, 1967. Paris : Présence Africaine, 189-198.

CALVET, L.-J., 1974. Linguistique et colonialisme : Petit traité de glottophagie. Paris : Payot.

— (1981). Les langues véhiculaires. Paris : P.U.F. (coll. « Que sais-je ? » n° 1916). — (1982). The spread of Mandingo : Military, commercial, and colonial influence on a

linguistic datum, in ed. by Cooper, R. L. (ed.) Language spread : Studies in diffusion and social change, Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 184-197.

— (1992). Ce que la linguistique doit aux études créoles, Études créoles 15/2 : 9-44. CHAMBERS, J. K., 1995. Sociolinguistic theory : Linguistic variation and its social

significance, Oxford, UK & Cambridge, USA : Blackwell. See Samarin 1997. COLRAT DE MONTROZIER, R., 1902. Deux ans chez les anthropophages et les Sultans

du Centre Africain, Paris : Pion. DECHAMPS-WENEZOUI, M., 1981. Le français, le sango et les autres langues

centrafricaines : Enquête sociolinguistique au quartier Boy-Rabe (Bangui, Centrafrique), Paris : SELAF.

Dna-KIDIRI, M., 1981. L'expansion du sango en Centrafrique, in Caprile, J.-P. (ed.) L'expansion des langues africaines : peut, sango, kikongo, ciluba, swahili, LACITO-Documents, Afrique 8, série 'Contacts de langues et contacts de cultures, Paris : SELAF, 29-42.

376 WILLIAM SAMARIN

— (1982). Variations libres entre phonèmes en sango langue nationale de R.C.A. Étude et mesure, in Boyeldieu, P. & Diki-Kidiri, M. (éds) Le domaine ngbandi, Paris : SELAF, 81-103.

IPEKO-ETOMANE, F.-A., 1981. Mariage mixte à Bangui, Paris : Agence de coopération culturelle et technique, Nîmes : Le Méridien.

JACQUOT, A., 1961. Notes sur la situation du sango à Bangui, Africa 31/2 : 158-166. — (1962). Notes à propos des éléments non africains du lexique sango (République

Centrafricaine), Bulletin de l'Institut de Recherches Scientifiques au Congo 1/2 : 55-61.

— (1971). Les langues du Congo-Brazzaville : Inventaire et classification, Cahiers d'O.R.S.T.O.M(Série Sciences humaines) 8(4) : 349-357.

JOYCE, H. & SAMARIN, W. J., 1997. Phonological variation in French loan words in urban Sango. Paper read at the Twentieth Annual Conference on African Linguistics, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 11-12 July 1997.

JUFLXARD, C., 1995. Sociolinguistique urbaine : La vie des langues à Ziguinchor (Sénégal), Paris : CNRS Éditions.

KALCK, P., 1959. Réalités oubanguienn, Paris : Berger-Levrault. — (1971). La République Centrafricaine, in Encyclopédie politique et

constitutionnelle (Institut International d'Administration Publique), Paris : Berger-Levrault.

KULOC, D., 1992. Language shift and cultural reproduction : Socialization, self, and syncretism in a Papua New Guinean village, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.

LEBEUF, J.-P., (sans date [1951]). Bangui (Oubangui-Chari, A.E.F.), Rapport d'une enquête préliminaire dans les milieux urbains de la Fédération (2), Paris : Haut Commissariat de la République en A.E.F. ; Paris : Éditions de l'Union Française. Brochure, 66 pp., 4 plans.

— (1953). Afrique Équatoriale ; Ville africaine de Bangui. Encyclopédie Mensuelle d'outre-mer, Paris, Janvier, vol. 3, fasc. 2,15-17.

LEMOTO, É., 1977. Bangui, étude urbaine. Thèse de doctorat de troisième cycle en analyse régionale et aménagement du territoire (option : urbanisme). Université de Paris I.

MANESSY, G., 1995. Créoles, pidgins, variétés véhiculaires : Procès et genèse, Paris : CNRS Éditions.

MAZIÈRE, A. Cl. de, 1982. La marche au Nil de Victor Liotard : Histoire de l'implantation française dans le Haut-Oubangui 1891-1899, Aix-en-Provence : Université de Provence.

MONINO, Y., (éd.), 1988. Lexique comparatif des langues oubanguiennes. Paris : LACITO (Laboratoire de Langues et Civilisations à Tradition Orale).

MUYSKEN, P. & SMITH, N., 1995. The study of pidgin and creole, in J. ARENDS, P. MUYSKEN, et N. SMITH (éds.) Pidgins and Creoles : an Introduction, Amsterdam & New York, Benjamins, 3-14.

OWENS, J., 1995a. Minority languages and urban norms : A case study, Linguistics 33 : 305-358.

— (1995b). Language in the graphics mode : Arabic among the Kanuri of Nigeria, Language Sciences 17/2 :181-199.


POLOME, E., 1986. Aspects of language contact in Africa, in J., A., Fishman, A. Tabouret-Keller, M. Clyne, Bh. Krishnamurti, & M. Abdulaziz (eds.) The Fergusonian impact : In honor of Charles A. Ferguson on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Volume I : From phonology to society, Berlin, etc. : Mouton de Gruyter, 387-398.

REPUBLIQUE CENTRAFRICAINE, 1991. Évolution de l'enseignement en Oubangui-Chari et la République Centrafricaine.

SALMON, P., 1966. Les carnets de campagne de Georges Bricusse (6 février 1894 -18 juillet 1896), Bruxelles : Edition « Cemubac » [Centre Scientifique et Médical de l'Université Libre de Bruxelles en Afrique Centrale].

SAMARIN, W. J., 1955. Sango, an African lingua franca, Word 11: 254-267. — (1962). Lingua francas, with special reference to Africa, in Frank A. Rice (ed.)

Study of the role of second languages in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, Washington, D., C. : Center for Applied Linguistics, 54-64.

— (1966). Self-annulling prestige factors among speakers of a creole language, in William Bright (ed.) Sociolinguistics : Proceedings of the UCLA sociolinguistics conference,1964, The Hague : Mouton & Co. 188-213.

— (1967). A grammar of Sango, The Hague : Mouton & Co. — (1970). Sango, langue de l'Afrique centrale, Leiden : E. J. Brill — (1971). Salient and substantive pidginization, in Hymes, D., (ed.) Pidginization and

creolization of languages, Cambridge University Press, 117-140. — (1979). Simplification, pidginization, and language change, in HANCOCK, I. F., (ed.)

Readings in creole studies, Ghent, Belgium : E. Story-Scientia, 55-68. — (1982a). Colonization and pidginization on the Ubangi river. Journal of African

Languages and Linguistics 4 : 1-42. — (1982b). Goals, roles, and language skills in colonizing central equatorial Africa.

Anthropological Linguistics 224 : 410-422. — (1984a). The linguistic world of field colonialism. Language in Society 13 : 435-

453. — (1984b). La communication par les eaux et les mots oubanguiens. (Translation of

the English text of 1984/1985). Recherches centrafricaines. Problèmes et perspectives de la recherche historique. Table ronde : ASOM [Académie des Sciences d'Outre Mer], CHEAM [Centre de Hautes Études sur l'Afrique et l'Asie moderne], IHPOM, Paris, Septembre 1982. Etudes et documents, No. 18, Aix-en-Provence : Université de Provence, Institut d'Histoire des Pays d'Outre-Mer, 179-239.

— (1984/1985). Communication by Ubangian water and word. Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika 6: 309-373. See Samarin 1984c.

— (1985). Plurigenesis in pidginization, Journal of Historical Linguistics and Philology 2(1/2) : 100-119.

— (1986). The source of Sango's 'be', Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 1(2) : 205-223.

— (1987). Lingua franca, in U. Ammon, N. Dittmar, & K. J. Mattheier, (eds.) Sociolinguistics/Soziolinguistik, vol. 1, Berlin & New York : Walter de Gruyter, 371-374.

— (1988). Creating language and community in pidginization, Canadian Journal of Linguistics 33(2) : 155-165.

378 WILLIAM SAMARIN

— (1988). Le comportement linguistique des colonisateurs dans le Haut Congo français, in B. Jewsiewicki & H. Moniot (eds.) Dialoguer avec le Léopard ? Pratiques, savoirs et actes du peuple face au politique en Afrique noire contemporaine, Paris : L'Harmattan. 49-73.

— (1989a). The black man's burden : African colonial labor on the Congo and Ubangi Rivers, 1880-1900, Boulder, Colorado : Westview Press.

— (1989b). The colonial heritage of the Central African Republic : A linguistic perspective, The International Journal of African Historical Studies 22(4) : 697-711.

— (1989c). Language in the colonization of central Africa , Canadian Journal of African Studies/Revue canadienne des études africaines 23(2) : 232-248.

— (1991). An incipient ethnie model for urban Sango, Anthropological Linguistics 33(2) : 166-182.

— (1993). 'Morphophonemic «Complication» in Creolization.' Annual Meeting of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, Los Angeles, Jan. 1993.

— (1994). The creolization of Sango : A report of research accomplishments and research in progress. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, File 410-91-0251, 1 May 1991 to 31 March 1994.

— (1995). The urbanization and creolization of Sango. Paper read at the Twenty-sixth Annual Meeting on African Languages, University of California at Los Angeles. March 24-26.

— (1997a). Review of Chambers 1995, Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 12(2) : 345-351.

— (1997b). The creolization of pidgin morphophonology, in Arthur K. Spears & Donald (eds.) The structure and status of pidgins and Creoles, Spears & Donald Winford. Creole Language Library. Amsterdam : John Benjamins. 175-216.

— (1998a). The creation and critique of a Central African mythe, Revue française d'histoire d'outre-mer, tome 85, n° 318, 55-81.

— (1998b). External forces in remaking pidgin Sango. Paper read at the conference 'La coexistence des langues dans l'espace francophone : Approche macrosociolinguistique'. Rabat, Morocco, 25-28 September 1998.

— (In press). The status of Sango in fact and fiction. SANKOFF, G., 1977. Multilingualism in Papua New Guinea, Sociocultural dimensions

of language change, 119-131. SANKOFF, G. & BROWN, P., 1976. The origins of syntax in discourse : A case study of

Tok Pisin relatives, Language 52(3) : 631-666. TABER, Ch. R., 1964. French loan words in Sango : A statistical analysis of incidance.

M.A. thesis, Hartford Seminary Foundation, Hartford, Connecticut. THORNELL, Chr., 1997. The Sango language and its lexicon. Travaux de l'Institut de

Linguistique de Lund, 32 : Lund University Press, Sweden. VEISTROFFER, A., 1933. Les origines des trois points les plus importants actuellement :

Pointe-Noire, Brazzaville, Bangui, racontées par un témoin. Pour le Cinquantenaire de notre grande colonie de l'Afrique Equatoriale 1882-1932. Paris et Lille : Mercure/ Universel.

VILLIEN, Fr., 1985. Habitat et habitations dans les quartiers populaires de Bangui, Cahiers d'Outre-Mer 38(151) : 235-262.


— (1987). Bangui, ruralité et citadinité d'une ville d'Afrique centrale. Thèse de Doctorat d'Etat. Université de Bordeaux III, 2 tomes : « Livre Premier : La ville et ses populations », « Livre Second : Les hommes et leurs activités ».

VLLLIEN, Fr., SOUMILLE, P., VLDAL, P. & PLROVANO J.-P. (1990), Bangui, capitale d'un pays enclave d'Afrique centrale : Étude historique et géographique, Bordeaux : CRET (Université de Bordeaux III).

WALD, P., 1986. La diglossie immergée : représentations alternatives du répertoire linguistique chez les Yakoma de Bangui, Langage et Société 38, 51-67.

— (1987). De quoi la diglossie est-elle le modèle ? , in Vers des sociétés pluriculturelles : Études comparatives et situation en France. (Actes du Colloque international de l'AFA, Paris, 9, 10, 11 janvier 1986.) Paris : Éditions de l'ORSTOM, 672-679.

— (1990). Catégories de locuteur et catégories de langue dans l'usage du français en Afrique, Langage et Société 52, 5-21.

WALKER, J. & SAMARIN W J., 1992. Children crafting creolized Sango. Paper read at Sociolinguistics Symposium IX : Children and Language Change, 2-4 April 1992, University of Reading, England.

WENEZOUI-DESCHAMPS, M., 1988. Un 'bilinguisme convivial' : le cas du franc-sango chez les étudiants de Bangui, Cahiers du LACITO 3, 95-105.

WENEZOUI-DESCHAMPS, M. & GERBAULT, J., 1988. Pratiques langagières et enseignement en R.C.A. : Analyse comparée de deux enquêtes sur l'utilisation des langues, Cahiers du LACITO 3,179-194.


Figure 1. The percentage of all persons born in Bangui who are native speakers of Sango shown on the vertical axis, the year of birth on the horizontal axis. Based on the CAR census of 1988.

5 0 +

X X X X

4 5 + X X X | X X

I x

| X X I X X I X X

4 0 + X X X X X

X X X X X

3 5 + X X X X

X X X X

X 3 0 + X

X X

X 2 5 +

| X X X I x I x I x | X X X

20 + x x x

15 + — + + + + + + + .

1988 78 68 58 48 38 earlier


Figure 2. Percent of all persons born in Bangui who are native speakers of Gbaya or Banda (on the vertical axis [14 lines = 1 0 %]), year of birth on the horizontal axis.

I 55 +

I

X

50 + I X I

X i j X X X | X X

45+ X I I I X j X X I X I

40 + X X X X X | XX | X X I | XX I X I X

35 + X X X I X | XX X | XX I X I | XX

30+ XX I X I X I X | XXX | X X | XXX

25 + — + + + + + + +..

1988 78 68 58 48 38 earlier

382 WILLIAM SAMARIN

Figure 3. Persons of Gbaya and Banda ethnicity born in Bangui who claimed their ethnic languages as DD langue de premiere enfance EE in percentages (fourteen lines = ten percent), based on the census of 1988. Year of birth on the horizontal axis.

55

50 +

X

X

X

| X X X | X X

45+ X

X X X

X

40 + X X X X X X X

X X

X X X

X 35+ X X X

X XX X

XX X

XX 30+ XX

I X I X I X I X X X | X X | XXX

25 + — + + + + + + + _ .

1988 78 68 58 48 38 earlier

EXPLAINING SHIFT TO SANGO IN BANGUI

Table 1. The growth of the population of Bangui

383

1890 Toward the end of the year the military strength consists of 42 men.1

1891 E. Ponel is alone at the post with 38 men (19 militiamen, 14 Senegalese soldiers, 5 Pahouin, known today as Fang.2

1901 There are 77 in the French militia, and by another account 74, which has been reduced to only 40 by April.3

1904 Bangui is in a dilapidated and desolate condition, manned by 16 to 18 whites, having only one building constructed of brick (Mountmorres 1906:164).

1907 In what was called the « agglomération urbaine de Bangui » (recently become the capital of Oubangui-Chari), including the Mission de Saint Paul, the indigenous population is estimated at 800.4 There are thirty cases .5

1910 About 40 whites and 1,000 blacks : militiamen, trained workers, domestic servants, employees in commercial establishments, etc.

1911 There are about 40 whites; the post consisted of about thirty cases) (Deschamps 1911:87; 75).6

1913 There are 170 whites, 300 militiamen, and 3,000 « noirs » alloch=h 1929).7

1924 About 19,000 inhabitants.8

1925 About 20,000 native inhabitants around the city; 150 Europeans. 1929 About 250 European men, 50 European women, 5,000 to 6,000 « noirs ». 1932 About 5,000 to 6,000 unemployed blacks live around the city. Population about

15,000. 1935 Military personnel include five European officers and 250 tirailleurs. 1939 400 Europeans, 22,000 Africans. 1945 Native population around 25,000 in sixteen agglomerations based on ethnicity

(and not detribalised) around the urban core. 1947 1,200 Europeans. 1949 More than 2,000 whites and about 40,000 blacks. 1951 African population around 55,000 to 60,000, distributed in 110 quartiers. 1953 2,500 Europeans, 100,000 Africans. 1954 58,000 inhabitants. 1959 60,000 inhabitants at independence. 1961 90,000 inhabitants. 1962 72,000 African inhabitants, 3,000 Europeans.9

1964 126,000 inhabitants. 1966 152,000 inhabitants. 1982 347,000 inhabitants.10

1988 431,000 inhabitants." 1992 554,546 inhabitants.12

(1). Kalck, P., 1970, tome 2, p. 388. (2) Édouard Ponel, Archives Nationales, Aix-en-Provence, 4(3)D1. (3). ANX 4(3)D8; Desserier de Pauwel, Administrateur Adjoint de la Région de Bangui, to Commandant Général, commandant le Congo français à

384 WILLIAM SAMARIN

nationales à Aix-en-Provence, 4(3)D8. (4) Evaluation de la population indigène de l=Oubangui-Chari-Tchad, 1907. (5) Unless otherwise specified all that follows is from Boulvert 1989. See pages 100, 109, 131, 141, 152, 163, 169, 198, 199, 200, 210, 213, 215, 221, 224, 233, 242, 247, 255, 273, 274, 293. (6) He goes on to say that « à plusieurs kilomètres autour de Bangui, c'est désert complet » (Deschamps, 1911:76). This being in the tropical rain forest, Deschamps was undoubtedly complaining about the absence of villagers from whom they could acquire food. (7) My notes indicate that I was not certain of the source of this information. (8) B. Fotolot, 'Bangui', n.d. (but apparently during or after 1989), p. 33. Also for the years 1954 and 1966. (9) A document produced by the city government, Bangui: capitale de la République centrafricaine (1962), in discussing a plan for its urbanization, says that housing was one of the « graves problèmes d' urbanisme » (page 21), and mentions on the map 'Plan directeur de la ville de Bangui' that there was a plan to construct 150 hectares of « lotissements urbain » (10) Dr. Hans F. Illy, 'Schema indicatif de développement intégré de 1' Afrique de 1' Ouest. Première phase : image base. République Centrafricaine. Rapport de synthèse'. Club de Dakar, Novembre 1982. Mimeographed, 33 pp. (11) Official census of 1988. (12) Official census of Bangui by quartier and arrondissement, the Mairie de Bangui , Direction des Affaires Administratives et Communales, Service des Affaires Communales, Délégation spéciale de la Ville de Bangui, 9 June 1992. But Fotolot (n.d.) gives 534,996 as the population. Different figures are given by M.-Fr. Adrien-Rongier but without documentation (1981: 93) for 1934, 1945, 1960, and 1981: 19 000, 30 000, 100 000, and 250 000 respectively.

Table 2.

Arrondissement Percent of Sangophone Percent of allophone I 42.6% French, 14.1% II 28.3% Ngbandi, 43.5% III 25.0% Arabic, 10.0% IV 47.6% Gbaya, 42.3% V 35.9% Banda, 27.4% VI 2.0% Ngbaka/Gbanzili, 57.3% VII 35.7% Banda, 32.6% VIII 24.8% Gbaya, 42.4%

Averages 30.2% 33.7%

Percent of people speaking Sango as their first language (Sangophone) and those speaking another language as their first language (allophone) — the latter being only the top figure — in all the quartiers of each arrondissement in Bangui, based on the census of 1988.


Table 3. The average percentages of people in each arrondissement of Bangui who, having learned Sango in early childhood, are native speakers of this language, based on the first to the tenth most populous quartier of each arrondissement according to the census of 1988 and the number of quartiers out of ten in which Sango was most frequently cited as the first language of childhood.

Arrondissement Sango highest ranked

Number of quartiers

I 48.2% 8

II 37.3% 6

III 41.3% 6

IV 66.8% 7

V 48.2% 4

VI 19.0% 1

VII 42.1% 6

VIII 36.5% 4

Average 42.4%


Table 4.

ARRONDISSEMENT QUARTIERS

I (1) Centre Ville; (2) Camp Kassai ; (3) Camp Izamo; (4) Camp Fidèle; Obrou; (5) 9 Villas ; (6) 200 Villas; (7) 36 Villas; (8) Cité Udéac, Cité Universitaire; (9) Camp Gardes; (10) Cité Christophe.

II (1) Sica 2; (2) Sica-Saidou ; (3) Batambo ; (4) Yapele 1; (5) Bruxelles; (6) Kingoma; (7) Sapeke 2; (8) Lakouanga 5; (9) Sica Assana ; (10) Zebe.

III (I) Lobaye (Baya-Dombia); (2) Kokolo 5; (3) Kolongo

3 ; (4) Ouham Pende 2 (Ramandji); (5) Boulata ; (6) Yalao; (7) Ilot des Castors ; (8) Kokolo 3; (9) Kokolo 1; (10) Sanga.

IV (1) Ouham 1; (2) Votongbo; (3) Gobongo 1; (4)

Dedengue 4; (5) Lando; (6) Dedengue 1; (7) Lipia 1; (8) Dedengue 5; (9) Cité Jean XXIII; (10) Ouham Pende 1.

V (1) Kolongo 1; (2) Basse-Kotto (Gbakondja); (3) Bangui-Mpoko; (4) La Famille Walingba; (5) Ngouciment 1; (6) Vara ; (7) Benz Vi 1; (8) Kolongo 2; (9) Yassara ; (10) Kaya.

VI (1) Kpetene 1; (2) Bogbaya; (3) Fatima 1; (4) Kpetene 5; (5) Petevo; (6) Batalimon; (7) Sapeke; (8) Mokala (Yaka) ; (9) Kpetene 4; (10) Linguissa 1.

VII (1) Gbangouma 4; (2) Ngaragba 4; (3) Ngatoua (Ngaragba); (4) Pata (Gbangouma 3); (5) Gbadouma ; (6) Gbotoro (Ngaragba); (7) Saint Paul ; (8) Tokoa Saint Paul (Mambassa); (9) Kodjo (Ouango); (10) Ouango 1 (Ketegba 1).

VIII (1) Ngongono 3; (2) Galabadja 3; (3) Ngongonon 2; (4) Galabadja 5; (5) Ngongono 1; (6) Galabadja 4; (7) Lipia 2; (8) Gobongo 2; (9) Galabadja Sinistres; (10) Gobongo 3.

The ten neighborhoods (quartiers) of each ward (arrondissement) in Bangui with the highest percentagesof persons who claimed Sango as their language of earliest childhood, ranked from highest (1) to lowest (10). based on the census of 1988. See accompanying map.

EXPLAINING SHIFT TO SANGO IN BANGUI 3 8 7

Les quartiers de Bangui Table 5.

Préfectures Gbaya Ngbaka Banda Zande/ Nzakara

Ngbandi

1 Ombella-M'poko Greater Bangui

52.0% 14.5%

7 Ouham 66.3%

8 Kémo-Ibingui 37.4% 46.7% 9 Nana-Gribizi 58.2% 22.6% 10 Bamingui-Bangoran 41.0% 11 Ouaka 60.2% 12 Basse-Kotto 39.1% 41.7% 13 M=Bomou 12.9% 60.2% 14 Haute-Kotto 50.0% 15 Haut-M=Bomou 55.4%

A sample of the inhabitants of Bangui born in some of the seventeen préfecture s of the Central African Republic, being native speakers of their ethnic languages, based on the census of 1988. Omitted are those préfecture s for which significant numbers are not available.


Table 6.

Ethnicity Sangophone Bilingual

Banda N = 22 10 45.4% 12 54.5%

Gbanzili N = 5 5 100.0% C

Gbaya N = 95 28 29.4% 67 70.5%

Kaba N = 2 C 2 100.0%

Kanre N = 5 1 20.0% 4 80.0%

Mbati N = 56 20 35.7% 36 64.2%

Muslim N = 32 2 6.2% 30 93.7%

Ngbaka N = 66 22 33.3% 44 66.6%

Yakoma N = 22 6 27.2% 16 72.7%

Zairean N = 2 C 2 100.0%

Total 307 94 Average: 30.6% 213 Average: 69.3%

Sangophones and bilinguals (speaking the language of one of the parents) in a random population of Bangui (those whose speech was tape-recorded and from whom personal information was elicited), mostly young, from 307 intra-ethnic marriages.

Table 7. Sangophone Allophone

Male Female Male Female

Self-reported, Ages 6-64, N = 34 65% 78% 35% 22% Preschool, Ages 3-6, N = 189 3 7% 45% 63% 55%

Percentages of Sangophones and allophones among subjects of Yakoma ethnicity in two cohorts (self-reported competence and competence alleged by parents), by gender.

Table 8.

Gbaya : 21 subjects Yakoma : 18 subjects

9.4% 16.8%

The incidence by percentage of the variant /R! of the variable {ti} in the extempora-neous speech of Gbaya and Yakoma children 12-15 years in age.


Table 9.

Ethnicity Male Female Averages

Banda 1 N = 125 44.0% 55 50.4% 63 47.2%

Banda2 N = 100 50.0% 50 41.0% 41 45.5%

Gbaya1 N = 91 46.1% 42 35.1% 32 40.6%

Kaba N = 150 35.3% 53 34.6% 52 35.0%

Gbaya2 N = 236 32.2% 76 30.5% 72 31.3%

Bwamba N = 150 28.6% 43 29.3% 44 29.0%

Ngbaka N = 199 30.1% 60 21.6% 43 25.8%

Yakoma N = 194 17.0% 31 22.1% 43 19.5%

Percentages of preschool children identified by their parents and adult kin as being Sangophone, organized by ethnicity and gender, ranked in decreasing magnitude. Superscript numerals in the ethnicity column indicate interviews made by two different assistants. N in the first column is the number of all subjects (reduced in all cases for various reasons) and the small numbers in the second column the actual numbers of Sangophones.

Table 10.

Adults N = 4490

Adolescents N = 1432

Children N = 1939

Males 25.50% 45.77% 67.69%

Females 37.08% 51.69% 70.85%

The average percentages of a Protestant population of 7,956 in Bangui in 1994 who are native speakers of Sango.

Table 11. Marriages N = 104 Male N = 68 Female N = 36

Mixed, 45.19% N = 47 34 32.69% 13 12.50%

Non-Mixed, 54.80% N = 57 34 32.69% 23 22.12%

Native speakers of Sango in 47 mixed and 57 non-mixed marriages among subjects randomly selected in Bangui (ages 4-29).v

390 WILLIAM SAMARIN

Table 12. Sangophone children in mixed marriages.

Place N of Subjects = 264 % Mixed % Sangophone

EEF / Castor 39 66.6% 85.0%

École / Boy Rabe 46 36.9% 76.4%

École / Sao (Ouango) 40 30.0% 69.2%

Ecole Centre Mixte 58 43.1% 56.0%

Ecole St. Jean 64 29.6% 52.6%

EEF / Kassaï 17 29.4% 40.0%

Sangophone children among 263 in cours moyen deux in six locations, showing (1) the percentages of children of ethnically mixed marriages at each location and (2) the percentages (in decreasing order of magnitude) of those among them who are Sangophone. Data from interviews in 1991 and 1992 by WJS. EEF = Église évangélique des frères.

Table 13.

Gender Age N Mother's language Father's language Male 10-19 23 9 14

2 0 - 3 0 14 7 7 Female 10-19 17 11 6

2 0 - 3 0 10 2 8

Bilingualism in either the mother's or the father's language in a sample of 64 persons bom of ethnically mixed parentage by age and gender. All speak Sango.

Table 14. x

Age 5 B 19 20 B 35

Gender Male N = 85 Female N = 42 Male N = 47 Female N = 14

SANGOPHONE, 99 64.7% N = 55 52.3% N = 22 44.6% N = 21 7.1% N = 1

Bilingual, 62 24.7% N = 21 40.4% N = 17 29.7% N = 14 71.4% N = 10

Trilingual, 27 10.5% N = 9 7.1% N = 3 25.5% N = 12 21.4% N = 3

Native speakers of Sango and bilinguals (in both Sango and the ethnic language of one parent) from 188 mixed marriages in Bangui, by age cohorts and gender. Among trilinguals one of the languages may be French. The averages are as follows: Sangophone : 5-19, 58.5 %, 20-35,25.9 %; Bilingual : 5-19,32.5 % ; 20-35, 50.6 %.

CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC ADMINISTRATIVE BOUNDARIES

Prefectures

50 100 150 200

tfl X -0 r1 >

00 s H H O 00 £ o o co o c

50

SOMMAIRE

Gabriel MANESSY 11

Bibliographie

LINEAMENT De la ''transmission de la tradition ' aux 'contraintes anthropologiques ' Pidginisation et créolisation Vernacularisation et appropriation Sémantaxe Présentation de l'ouvrage

1. DESCRIPTION Serge SAUVAGEOT

Mary LAUGHREN

Annie RIALLAND

Gudrun MIEHE Ekkehart WOLFF

2. COMPARAISON t Jean L. DONEUX Marie-Paule FERRY & Konstantin POZDNIAKOV Kerstin WINKELMANN Pascal BOYELDIEU & France CLOAREC-HEISS Rainer VOSSEN (avec la collaboration de Henning SCHREIBER) PetrZIMA

3. SOCIETE Christian SEIGNOBOS & Henry TOURNEUX Paulette ROULON-DOKO

De quelques procédés de mise en relief en baynugk Senufo vowel harmony : the representation of tongue height contrasts Une 'ponctuation vocalique' en gulmancema (langue gurma) et les conséquences de sa perte dans une langue proche : le moba L'impératif en kâânsa (Burkina Faso) Tonal Rhymes in Hausa Revisited

Voltaïque, Atlantique : qu'en dire maintenant ? Dialectique du régulier et de l'irrégulier ; Le système des classes nominales dans le groupe Tenda des langues atlantiques Les vestiges des classes nominales en tyefo Les choix vocaliques de deux parlers banda : correspondances ou ressemblances régulières ? Approche de la situation dialectologique du bisa (mandé oriental) : la phonologie

Créolisations, interférences et problèmes de la classification des dialectes dans le domaine hawsa

Contribution à l'Histoire des Toupouri et de leur langue Approche ethnolinguistique dans le domaine des techniques culinaires : l'exemple du gbayabodoe de Centrafrique

14

21 24 27 30 32 38

41 43

57

91

103 117

127 129 153

169 183

221

239

253 255

285

Marie-Christine HAZ AËL-MAS SIEUX

Ambroise QUEFFÉLEC

Pierre DUMONT

4. GENESE William. J. SAMARIN Emilio BONVINI

Marie-José DALBERA-STEFANAGGI & Jean-Philippe DALBERA Robert CHAUDENSON

5. PROCES Denis CREISSELS

Catherine MILLER

Yves SIMARD

Gisèle PRIGNITZ

Carole de FERAL

6. SAISIES Albert VALDMAN

Bernard POTTIER Mario ROSSI

Robert NICOLAÏ

Les créoles, langues en péril ? 305

Français et contact de langues au Moyen- 327 Congo à l'époque coloniale (1920-1940) Le sociolinguiste et le politique : dialogue 339 impossible ?

349 Explaining Shift to Sango in Bangui 351 Une problématique non stabilisée : langues 393 africaines et créolisation au Brésil Réflexion sur la dimension socio- 409 linguistique du changement diachronique. Corse-français : une évolution croisée Dernier entretien avec Gabriel Manessy 423

431 Catégorisation et grammaticalisation : la 433 relation génitivale en mandingue Grammaticalisation du verbe gale « dire » 455 et subordination en Juba-Arabic Français de Côte-d'Ivoire : L'actualisation 483 du nom chez des locuteurs non scolarisés La notion de sémantaxe à l'épreuve d'un 497 corpus de français parlé au Burkina Faso Sémantaxe et changement linguistique : 515 quelques réflexions sur la pronominali-sation en pidgin-english (Cameroun et Nigeria)

527 Le sentiment linguistique natif dans 529 l'analyse de la variation phonologique en créole haïtien Sur les classifications verbales 543 La dichotomie segmental/suprasegmental 551 est-elle justifiée ? Temporalité des langues et historicité des 569 descriptions (réflexion sur les questions d'échelles)

PEETERS P E E T E R S - B O N D G E N O T E N L A A N 1 5 3 - B - 3 0 0 0 L E U V E N

Leçons d'Afrique

Documents

Transcript of Leçons d'Afrique