Tsaangi language

Last updated
Tsaangi
Icaangi
Native to Gabon, Republic of Congo
Native speakers
 22,000 (2000) [1]
Language codes
ISO 639-3 tsa
Glottolog tsaa1242 [2]
B.53 [3]

Tsaangi (Tsangui) is a Bantu language spoken in Gabon and the Republic of Congo.

Gabon country in Africa

Gabon, officially the Gabonese Republic, is a country on the west coast of West-Central Africa. Located on the equator, Gabon is bordered by Equatorial Guinea to the northwest, Cameroon to the north, the Republic of the Congo on the east and south, and the Gulf of Guinea to the west. It has an area of nearly 270,000 square kilometres (100,000 sq mi) and its population is estimated at 2 million people. Its capital and largest city is Libreville.

Related Research Articles

Languages of Gabon languages of a geographic region

There Is no official language in Gabon, however 32% of the people speak Fang as a mother tongue. French is the medium of instruction. Before World War II very few Gabonese learned French, nearly all of them working in either business or government administration. After the war, France worked for universal primary education in Gabon, and by the 1960-61 census, 47% of the Gabonese over the age of 14 spoke some French, while 13% were literate in the language. By the 1990s, the literacy rate had risen to about 60%.

Guthrie classification of Bantu languages Linguistic classification

The 250 or so "Narrow Bantu languages" are conventionally divided up into geographic zones first proposed by Malcolm Guthrie (1967–1971). These were assigned letters A–S and divided into decades ; individual languages were assigned unit numbers, and dialects further subdivided. This coding system has become the standard for identifying Bantu languages; it was the only practical way to distinguish many ambiguously named languages before the introduction of ISO 639-3 coding, and it continues to be widely used. Only Guthrie's Zone S is (sometimes) considered to be a genealogical group. Since Guthrie's time a Zone J has been set up as another possible genealogical group bordering the Great Lakes.

The Nzebi languages are a series of Bantu languages spoken in the western Congo and in Gabon. They are coded Zone B.50 in Guthrie's classification. According to Nurse & Philippson (2003), the Nzebi languages form a valid node with West Teke (B.70). The languages are:

References

  1. ↑ Tsaangi at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. ↑ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Tsaangi". Glottolog 3.0 . Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  3. ↑ Jouni Filip Maho, 2009. New Updated Guthrie List Online


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