Central Sudanic

The Central Sudanic languages, some sixty tongues grouped within Nilo-Saharan, are spoken across the belt between Lake Chad and the Nile-Congo divide. The western Bongo-Bagirmi branch includes Baguirmi, Sara and Bongo, while the eastern branch holds the Moru-Madi cluster, together with Mangbetu and Lendu.

Nearly all these languages were unwritten vernaculars, and the only one to become the language of a state was Baguirmi, carried by the sultanate founded at Massenya, southeast of Lake Chad, in 1522. Long a tributary of Bornu, its court took Islam under Mbang Abdullah around 1580.

The sultanate regained independence in the eighteenth century, only to fall to Wadai in 1805. The Moru-Madi and their neighbours remained the languages of village cultivators and hunters without courts or scripts.