It is an official language in the Central African Republic,[4] where it is used as a lingua franca across the country and had 450,000 native speakers in 1988.

Sango was used as a lingua franca for trade along the Ubangi River before French colonisation in the late 1800s and has since expanded as an interethnic communication language.

Sango is considered easy to learn,[clarification needed] although reaching true fluency takes time, as with any other language.

Some linguists, following William J. Samarin, classify it as a Ngbandi-based creole; however, others (like Marcel Diki-Kidiri, Charles H. Morrill) reject that classification and say that changes in Sango structures (both internally and externally) can be explained quite well without a creolization process.

[6] The French army recruited Central Africans, causing them to increasingly use Sango as a means of interethnic communication.

The rapid growth of the city of Bangui since the 1960s has had significant implications for the development of Sango, with the creation, for the first time, of a population of first-language speakers.

Also, its new position as the everyday language of the capital city has led to Sango gaining greater status and being used increasingly in fields for which it was previously the norm to use French.

Morrill's work, completed in 1997, revealed that there were three sociologically distinct norms emerging in the Sango language: an urban "radio" variety which is ranked[clarification needed] by 80% of his interviewees and has very few French loan words; a so-called "pastor" variety, which is scored[clarification needed] 60%; and a "functionary" variety, spoken by learned people, who make the highest use of French loanwords while speaking Sango, which scores 40%.

[7] Tones have a low functional load, but minimal pairs exist: dü 'give birth' versus dû 'hole'.

[9] Verbs take a prefix a- if not preceded by a pronoun: mo yeke "you are" but Bêafrîka ayeke "Central Africa is".

Sango began being written by French missionaries, with Catholic and Protestant conventions differing slightly.

Also, the digraphs ⟨kp, gb, mb, mv, nd, ng, ngb, nz⟩ are pronounced [k͡p], [ɡ͡b], [ᵐb], [(ᶬv)], [ⁿd], [ᵑɡ], [ᵑ͡ᵐɡ͡b] and [ⁿz], respectively.

[11] The official orthography contains the following consonants: ⟨p, b, t, d, k, g, kp, gb, mb, mv, nd, ng, ngb, nz, f, v, s, z, h, l, r, y, w⟩: some add ⟨’b⟩ for the implosive /ɓ/.

[12] Sango is considered unusually easy to learn; according to Samarin, "with application a student ought to be able to speak the language in about three months."

For example, if one pronounces a question with a rising tone as in English, one may inadvertently be saying an entirely different and inappropriate Sango word at the end of the sentence.