Sara languages of southern Chad constitute the quilt's largest patch, stretching from Logone Occidental Prefecture to eastern Moyen-Chari Prefecture. Linguists divide Sara languages into five subgroups. Sara languages seem to have drifted into southern Chad from the northeast. Eventually, Sara speakers left behind the northern languages of the group as they made their way to the richer hunting grounds and agricultural land south of the Chari River. This must have occurred very long ago, however, because the Sara languages and those of the northern members of the group are mutually unintelligible. Moreover, Sara oral traditions record only short-range migrations of Sara speakers in the south, suggesting that movement from the north happened earlier.
Grimes (1996; citing UBS 1991) and UBS (l982) notes 600,000 Ngambai speakers; Voegelin and Voegelin (1977) report about 284,000 for all the dialects.
The Sara dialect cluster represents local first languages.
Thayer (l973) noted that Chad uses a standardized Ngambai orthography. No other information has come to our attention as of this writing.
Sara proper is taken to be the dialect for which materials should be prepared.
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