Pronunciation and Orthography

Vowels

Sango has seven vowels: five long vowels A, E, I, O, and U (pronounced respectively as in "far", "hate", "meet", "boat", and "tool") and two short ones Ɛ (as in "bet" or "set") and Ɔ (as in "more", "door", and "cold"). Regrettably (for want of separate keys on imported French typewriters) these last two short vowels are invariably written the same as their long cousins, but vowel length is important to distinguish between very common mono- and disyllabic words that are otherwise identically-spelled:  dë (be cold) vs. dɛ̈ (grow) or tö (transport) vs. tɔ̈ (east).  If you are not already fluent in Sango, do yourself and your readers a favor by using distinct letters (if not the IPA symbols Ɛ and Ɔ then maybe E: and O:). Because Sango (like Hungarian and Finnish) has vowel length harmony (i.e. every e/o in a word is either all long or all short, with very few exceptions), it is easier to remember whether a word as a whole is long or short. Again, sadly, because vowel length is not written by native speakers, most foreigners in the CAR are completely oblivious to its semantic importance and their Sango suffers needlessly for it.

The above seven vowels each come in one of three pitch tones: low, medium, and high, indicated with diacritics. They are written with no accent (a) for low tone, dierhesis (ä) for medium tone, and circumflex (â) for high tone, and are pronounced roughly as in the words ("no!", "what?!", and a very surprised "huh???") respectively. These three pitch (not stress!) tones give the language a very musical quality, and although they are not absolutely critical to making oneself understood in Sango (unlike say, Chinese), they are a vital part of understanding the language when spoken by others. Start out by exaggerating tones in the beginning: people will understand you more easily, and over time you will naturally ease into the more subtle tone variations of native speakers. If you start out with no (or random) tonal variations, you will always have trouble (I did, and I still do!). In case you want to copy and paste these in your browser, they are listed here. [I find that Charis SIL is a great font to use when writing Sango, since it handles diacritics and IPA symbols well.]

  Ê  Π Ô  Û  Ɛ̂  Ɔ̂

Ä  Ë  Ï  Ö  Ü  Ɛ̈  Ɔ̈

A  E  I  O  U  Ɛ  Ɔ

â  ê  î  ô  û  ɛ̂  ɔ̂

ä  ë  ï  ö  ü  ɛ̈  ɔ̈

a  e  i  o  u  ɛ  ɔ

If you are as allergic to inputting special characters on your keyboard as I am, especially when inputting large amounts of Sango text, there is an easy ASCII-only encoding I invented, and then you can run a post-processor over it to convert to diacritics.

In principle, there are even more tones (high and low rising and falling), but you can ignore these because these are found only in a few common Sango words (see, there, true, cross, behold, banana), and are mainly indicative of foreign loanwords. They are written as a doubled consonant:  bâa (see), mɛɛ̈ (but, from French mais), balêe (broom, from French balet).

In practice, the middle tone is much rarer than the low tone (most common) and high tone (second-most common), so if you simply cannot manage three distinct tones, you can safely fuse the middle tone with either high or low tone so long as the rising or falling pitch shape is preserved: nzɔ̈nî can be approximated as nzɔnî and äpɛ can be approximated as âpe.

Finally, vowels may be nasalized (as in French), indicated by adding an n. Athough tribal Sango uses nasalized vowels throughout the word (perhaps because it has a much richer vocabulary and more synthetic grammar), national Sango has more analytic syntax with more frequent use of structure words like na (to), tî (of), nî (the), so only the final syllable has a useful nasal, and even then this is restricted to a few common words such as in (yes), in in (no), hôn (nose), hɔ̈n (pass), wên (metal), nyɔ̈n (drink), and fün (smell). As in Japanese, all syllables are consonant + vowel, so if a word ends in n, the final vowel is nasalized.

And because syllables are always consonant + vowel, take care to divide the syllables correctly: a consonant group is never split. The word ngbangbo (hundred) has only two vowels and therefore only two syllables: ngba and ngbo. Just as Spanish speakers often have trouble with initial "sp" in English (and say "especial" instead of "special"), so English speakers want to misprounounce ngbangbo as *ing-bang-bo*. Resist the urge. Like Russian, Sango has some consonant "clusters" that take getting used to. Although these are written with multiple letters, remember that they are a single consonant. Note again how important tones and vowel length are: ngbangbo is pronounced with two low tones, but ngbâ (high tone) means remain and ngbɔ̈ (middle tone) means snake or twin. When speaking slowly, context can be used to disambiguate homonyms missing tones, but at speed tones are absolutely critical to distinguishinging word boundaries since there are so few stress clues. I have noticed that speakers of languages with rich consonant clusters and stress accents (like English) especially seem to have extra trouble telling where one word stops and another begins compared to e.g. French speakers.

Consonants

The consonants in Sango are written as in English, remembering that multiple letters are pronounced as a single consonant. Consonants divide into groups, with unvoiced, voiced, and (sometimes) nasalized forms:

p   b   mb

f   v   mv

t   d   nd

s   z   nz

k   g   ng

kp   gb   ngb

y   ny

m   n

l   r

h   w

Regional Differences

There are a few regional and individual differences which are not serious but should be noted:

1) l and r are often (though not always) interchangeable (allophonic): e.g. bara or bala (greet), sâra or sâla (do, make). Where there are multiple possible meanings, each tends to keep a preferred pronunciation: wara (find) vs. wala (or).

2) Occasionally, i is used informally in place of ɛ (preserving tone, of course!): tɛ̂ngbi vs. tîngbi (join), or (confusingly!) using ï (the formal/Catholic form of you [plural]) in place of ë (we, us).

3) The letter h comes only at the beginning of a few common words, and functions either as a glottal stop or is silent (usually depending on whether your native tribal language makes this distinction). Consequently, many people add or leave off h indifferently before words that start with a vowel, and the orthography is not yet standard on this (I put the more common spelling first):

ânge or hânge (crawl)

hînga or înga (know)

hîo or îo (quickly)

ɔ̂tɔ̈ or hɔ̂tɔ̈ (hill)

hûnda or ûnda (ask).

Traditionally, the h was more often left off, but nowadays it is increasingly added. This is especially true for nouns and verbs, for which when the plural prefix â and finite verb prefix a is prepended, a stronger glottal stop is heard and otherwise the false diphthong would look funny.

4) As mentioned early, many words have lost their nasal vowels, and some even their nasal consonants (especially nyi), as they passed from tribal Sango to an intertribal Sango lingua franca, e.g. what is now usually written and pronounced îtä (brother, sister) used to be pronounced nyîtä.

5) nz is pronounced variously as nz (as in "unzip"),  nj (as in "in jail"), or even nzh (as in "Stonehenge"). These are completely equivalent and never cause confusion.

6) Tribes in the eastern CAR tend to have tribes languages with only two tones, and pronounce the middle and high tones identically. This is relatively unimportant, since low-tone vowels are the most frequent, followed by high-tone ones, with middle-tone vowels the least frequent. If a speaker consistently fuses middle and high tones, a listener will have no trouble understanding.

Last modified on 21 July 2012.