The Ngbandi language is a

dialect continuum A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of Variety (linguistics), language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are Mutual intelligibility, mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulat ...

of the Ubangian family spoken by a half-million or so people in the

Democratic Republic of Congo The Democratic Republic of the Congo (french: République démocratique du Congo (RDC), colloquially "La RDC" ), informally Congo-Kinshasa, DR Congo, the DRC, the DROC, or the Congo, and formerly and also colloquially Zaire, is a country in ...

(Ngbandi proper) and in the

Central African Republic The Central African Republic (CAR; ; , RCA; , or , ) is a landlocked country in Central Africa. It is bordered by Chad to the north, Sudan to the northeast, South Sudan to the southeast, the DR Congo to the south, the Republic of th ...

(Yakoma and others). It is primarily spoken by the

Ngbandi people The Ngbandi are an ethnic group from the region of the upper Ubangi River; they inhabit the northern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and southern Central African Republic. They traditionally speak the Ngbandi language, which is part of the U ...

, which included the dictator of what was then known as

Zaire Zaire (, ), officially the Republic of Zaire (french: République du Zaïre, link=no, ), was a Congolese state from 1971 to 1997 in Central Africa that was previously and is now again known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Zaire was, ...

Mobutu Sese Seko Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga (; born Joseph-Désiré Mobutu; 14 October 1930 – 7 September 1997) was a Congolese politician and military officer who was the president of Zaire from 1965 to 1997 (known as the Democratic Republic o ...

Varieties

Northern Ngbandi is the lexical source of the

trade language A lingua franca (; ; for plurals see ), also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, vehicular language, or link language, is a language systematically used to make communication possible between groups ...

Sango, which has as many native speakers as Ngbandi and which is used as a second language by millions more in the CAR. A variety of Ngbandi may have been spoken further east, in the DRC villages of Kazibati and Mongoba near Uganda, until the late 20th century, but this is uncertain. Yakoma, with a central position on the

Ubangi River The Ubangi River (), also spelled Oubangui, is the largest right-bank tributary of the Congo River in the region of Central Africa. It begins at the confluence of the Mbomou (mean annual discharge 1,350 m3/s) and Uele Rivers (mean annual discharge ...

that divides the CAR from the DRC, has a high degree of intelligibility with all other varieties of Ngbandi, though as with any dialect continuum, it does not follow that more distant varieties are necessarily as intelligible with each other as they are with Yakoma. Gbayi or Kpatiri is a divergent Ngbandic language. Gbayi had likely been adopted by people who had formerly spoken a

Zande language Zande is the largest of the Zande languages. It is spoken by the Azande, primarily in the northeast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and western South Sudan, but also in the eastern part of the Central African Republic. It is called Pazan ...

. Nzakara, a Zande language, is spoken near Gbayi. Perhaps not coincidentally, Kpatili also happens to be the name of a

spurious Spurious may refer to: * Spurious relationship in statistics * Spurious emission or spurious tone in radio engineering * Spurious key in cryptography * Spurious interrupt in computing * Spurious wakeup in computing * ''Spurious'', a 2011 novel ...

Zande language for which there is no linguistic data.

Phonology

The phonology consists of the following:

Consonants

* Sounds /l/ and /r/ alternate with each other.

Vowels

Writing system

References

{{Niger-Congo branches Ubangian languages Languages of the Democratic Republic of the Congo Languages of the Central African Republic