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<DIV><FONT face="Arial Cyr" size=2>When I first came to the Central African
Republic in 1968 one of the linguemes of the interethnic language sango
(creolized variant) among others like sango ti gara, sango ti turugbu (turugu),
sango ti salavisi, sango vehiculaire was MBI TENE (mid tone in the first lexeme
and 2 low tones in the second lexeme) which means "I say". Some of my
students used to have a negative attitude to it saying it wasn't worth
learning since it was no one's language. Since then the situation has changed
and sango has acquired prestige and become L1 for an increasing number of
young people in urban areas. Sango's political prestige has greatly
increased when it was declared an official language in 1991 in addition to
French with the aim that it must fulfil the functions hitherto restricted to
French. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Cyr" size=2> Another lingueme of this
kind is that of the congolese national language known as munukutuba (monokutuba)
in Brazzaville and kitiba in Kinshasa (Rep. Dem. du Congo). The latter
seems to be the creation of linguists because they consider the name
munukutuba too long (the opinion of Josue Ndamba). Actually ki- is the
bantu prefix and -tuba = to say. As far as the lingueme munukutuba is
concerned the first bantu morpheme munu- means "I" and the second and the
third -ku-tuba mean literally "you say". So munukutuba means "I
say to you". Munukutuba is one of the national languages in the
Republic of Congo (together with lingala).</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>Professor Valeri Khabirov</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>Chair of English Philology </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>and Contrastive Linguistics</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>Ural Pedagogical University</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>Ekaterinburg, </FONT><FONT size=2>Russia</FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>khabir@etel.ru</FONT></DIV>
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