French loanwords in children's Sango

The use of French loanwords in children's Sango holds important clues for the understanding of multilingual communities and language contact processes. Using a corpus of 169 spontaneous texts provided by urban children between the ages of 2 and 16, from non-scholarized to first-year Lycee, we provide an analysis of the phonological, morphological and semantic uses of French loanwords in Sango. This analysis suggests that the children of Bangui comprise a "speech sub-community" which mediates between individual children's innovations and the input from the adult speech community, and which reflects the evolution of Sango's relationship with French in the Central African Republic. The analysis also holds clues for understanding the way in which children create, or rather craft, new languages from the linguistic resources available to them