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Khoe-Kwadi languages map

12 Khoe-Kwadi languages are on the map, most of them in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. It divides into 2 main branches, the largest being Non-Khoekhoe (9 languages). The best-known members include Nama (Namibia). Only this family is drawn; tap the map to list every language at a spot.

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The filter only changes what is drawn. Tap the map to list every language at a spot, whichever family is shown. You can also pick any family from its own page.

Key

Language families (largest ten)

Atlantic-Congo
Austronesian
Sino-Tibetan
Indo-European
Afro-Asiatic
Nuclear Trans New Guinea
Otomanguean
Austroasiatic
Tai-Kadai
Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

The Khoe-Kwadi family at a glance

12languages
10drawn as areas
2shown as points
2main branches

Colours on the map mark the ten largest families; this page’s filter shows Khoe-Kwadi alone. Areas are generalisations from published atlases and overlap with the areas of other families.

Biggest Khoe-Kwadi languages

By approximate speaker counts from Wikidata, each with its source and year on its own page.

Where is Nama (Namibia) spoken? (about 250,000 speakers)

Branches of Khoe-Kwadi

The second level of the Glottolog family tree.

Non-Khoekhoe (9)
Khoekhoe (3)

Where Khoe-Kwadi languages are spoken

Countries with the most Khoe-Kwadi languages, with the number of languages in brackets.

All 12 Khoe-Kwadi languages, A to Z

Questions about Khoe-Kwadi languages

How many Khoe-Kwadi languages are there?

12 living Khoe-Kwadi languages are on this map, in the Glottolog classification. They fall into 2 main branches, the biggest being Non-Khoekhoe (9 languages). Other classifications group languages differently, so totals vary.

Where are Khoe-Kwadi languages spoken?

Botswana (11), Namibia (5), South Africa (4), Angola (2), Zimbabwe (2) and Zambia (1) have the most Khoe-Kwadi languages, with the number of languages in brackets.