<P> The largely interintelligible Manding languages of West Africa serve as lingua francas in various places . For instance Bambara is the most widely spoken language in Mali, and Jula (almost the same as Bambara) is commonly used in western Burkina Faso and northern Côte d'Ivoire . Manding languages have long been used in regional commerce, so much so that the word for trader, jula, was applied to the language currently known by the same name . Other varieties of Manding are used in several other countries, such as Guinea, The Gambia, and Senegal . </P> <P> The Sango language is a lingua franca developed for intertribal trading in the Central African Republic . It is based on the Northern Ngbandi language spoken by the Sango people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo but with a large vocabulary of French loan words . It has now been institutionalised as an official language of the Central African Republic . </P> <P> Swahili, known as Kiswahili to its speakers, is used throughout large parts of East Africa and the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo as a lingua franca, despite being the mother tongue of a relatively small ethnic group on the East African coast and nearby islands in the Indian Ocean . At least as early as the late 18th century, Swahili was used along trading and slave routes that extended west across Lake Tanganyika and into the present - day Democratic Republic of Congo . Swahili rose in prominence throughout the colonial era, and has become the predominant African language of Tanzania and Kenya . Some ethnic groups now speak Swahili more often than their mother tongues, and many, especially in urban areas, choose to raise their children with Swahili as their first language, leading to the possibility that several smaller East African languages will fade away as Swahili transitions from being a regional lingua franca to a regional first language . </P> <P> It has official status as a national language in DR Congo, Tanzania and Kenya, and symbolic official status (understood but not widely spoken) in Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi . It is the first language of education in Tanzania and in much of eastern Congo . It is also the auxiliary language to be in the proposed East African Federation . </P>

What is the lingua franca of much of eastern africa
find me the text answering this question