The four Mba languages form a small family of

Ubangian languages The Ubangian languages form a diverse linkage of some seventy languages centered on the Central African Republic. They are the predominant languages of the CAR, spoken by 2–3 million people, and include the national language, Sango. They are ...

scattered across the northern

Democratic Republic of the 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 ...

. The languages are, * Ma (A-Ma-Lo) * Dongo *

Mba A Master of Business Administration (MBA; also Master's in Business Administration) is a postgraduate degree focused on business administration. The core courses in an MBA program cover various areas of business administration such as accounti ...

* Ndunga The most populous is

itself, with about 40,000 speakers. Ma is the most divergent. The four Mba languages are not particularly closely related to each other and display considerable lexical diversity.

Language contact

The Mba languages have received significant influences from Bantu to the south, and from

Zande languages The Zande languages are half a dozen closely related languages of the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and South Sudan. The most populous language is Zande proper, with over a million speakers. Languages Per Boyd ...

to the north. For example, some Mba languages such as Ndunga have borrowed many noun prefixes from nearby Bantu languages (Pasch 1986, 1987, 1988).

Internal classification

Mba internal classification according to Pasch (1986): ;Mba * A-Ma-Lo *Ndunga-Mba-'Dongo **' Dongo-ko **Ndunga-Mba *** Ndunga-le ***

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References

{{Niger-Congo branches Ubangian languages