French in the Central African Republic

Abstract This chapter examines a conversation between two colleagues who work in the administration of the University of Bangui. The difficult living conditions in the Central African Republic are the main topic of the conversation. The speakers are multilingual, and their dominant language is Sango, the country’s main lingua franca. Some influences from Sango are attested in the speakers’ pronunciation, particularly in the domain of prosody. The conversation also displays lexical particularities, constructions that are typical of second-language speakers (the generalization of the auxiliary ‘avoir’), features that are attested in other varieties of French in Africa (e.g. the presence of the ‘ne’ of negation), as well as general properties of spontaneous oral discourse, such as overlapping turns and collaborative discourse.