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Ngbugu (interspersed with Ngbandi west of Mobayi). All population statistics are from
Fultz & Morgan except where noted. Two or three villages east of Pandu in the main
Gobu region speak a language called Ngbulu which may belong to the Banda group, but
survey needs to be done to clarify this. Cloarec-Heiss (1988) lists Kpala as a Banda
language, but Fultz & Morgan note that it is in fact related to Ngbaka-Ma’bo. There is no
present-day evidence that the Banda dialects Gbi, Kpagua, or Ngundu are spoken in D. R.
Congo, contrary to what is listed in Grimes (1996).
The Bili dialect of Mono appears to be the dominant dialect. It has a larger
population than all of the other Mono groups combined. In addition, it has the most
prestige of all the Mono dialects. All of the other groups hold a positive attitude toward
the Bili dialect.
1.2 Classification
Linguistic researchers have consistently classified Mono as a part of the Banda
language group (see, e.g., Tisserant 1930: 5 and Tucker & Bryan 1956: 33), an ethnically
homogenous yet linguistically diverse group with perhaps as many as 50 speech varieties
(Cloarec-Heiss 1988). Banda is generally considered to be part of the Ubangi branch of
Adamawa-Ubangi, itself a branch of Greenberg’s (1970) Niger-Congo phylum.
In this section, I will discuss in detail the internal classification of Banda. For the
interested reader, Appendix C offers an evaluation of the presently accepted status of the
Niger-Congo family, including a detailed discussion of the external and internal
relationships of Adamawa-Ubangi. Here, I provide just a few remarks highlighting the
major conclusions of Appendix C with respect to Adamawa-Ubangi.
The most widely accepted procedure for establishing the classification of a
language family is to reconstruct proto forms and then describe the systematic changes
resulting in the present-day forms by use of the comparative method. Classifications
based on other evidence, such as typological features or cognate percentages, are less
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