| Ngbandi | |
|---|---|
| Spoken in | Democratic Republic of the Congo |
| Region | Équateur Province |
| Ethnicity | Ngbandi, Yakoma |
| Native speakers | 250,000 Northern (2000) 105,000 Southern (undated) 110,000 Yakoma (1996) 20,000 others (1996) |
| Language family |
Ubangian
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | variously: ngb – Northern Ngbandi nbw – Southern Ngbandi yky – Yakoma deq – Dendi mgn – Mbangi gyg – Gbayi |
The Ngbandi language is a dialect continuum of the Ubangian family spoken by a half-million or so people in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Ngbandi proper) and in the Central African Republic (Yakoma and others). It is primarily spoken by the Ngbandi people, who included the dictator of what was then known as Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko.
Northern Ngbandi is the lexical source of the trade language Sango, which has as many native speakers as Ngbandi and which is used as a second language by millions more in the CAR.
Yakoma, with a central position on the Ubangi River 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.