Ubangian

Ubangian is a linkage of some seventy Niger-Congo tongues spread across the Central African Republic and adjoining parts of the Congo basin, from the Ubangi and Uele rivers to the edges of Sudan and Cameroon. Its branches include the Banda dialects of the central savanna, the Ngbandi and Yakoma of the Ubangi river, the Mundu and Baka of the forest edge, and the Zande group of the eastern watershed.

For most of their history these were village languages carried by farmers, fishermen and iron-working clans, but on the Ubangi a northern Ngbandi dialect used by river traders developed into Sango, an interethnic lingua franca current along the waterway before the colonial arrival.

From around 1700, Zande war bands under the Vungara clan and allied Bandia dynasty built conquest kingdoms. Succession wars pushed Zande rule and language eastward and northward until Sudanese raiders checked the expansion in the nineteenth century.