Publisher's Synopsis
This doctoral dissertation is an overview of the newly arisen Sango language in the Central African Republic. It contains both sociolinguistic and linguistic dimensions with a lexical-semantic focus on the vocabulary, in particular on the 20 most frequent verbs and verbs of motion.;The study is set within a multidisciplinary framework including a functional-typological perspective, language change induced by contact and language planning. It shows that the diachronic sociolinguistic context of Sango has greatly influenced its structures, while little language-internal development has taken place.;The author asserts that it is justified to treat Sango as an Ubangi language from a sociolinguistic and typological point of view. The volume is based on a range of sources, among which are a tape-recorded corpus of approximately 52,000 running words, and observations made under the author's 11-year stay between 1970 and 1991 in the western part of the Central African Republic.
