World Language Map

Where is Asu (Tanzania) spoken?

Asu (Tanzania) is an Atlantic-Congo language, spoken in Tanzania and Kenya. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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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.

Where Asu (Tanzania) is spoken

Asu (Tanzania) is spoken in 2 countries: Tanzania and Kenya. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Tanzania1.2%809,545
KenyaNot givenNot given

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Asu (Tanzania) is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Asu (Tanzania).

How many people speak Asu (Tanzania)?

Wikidata gives about 500,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 2000). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where Asu (Tanzania) sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Asu (Tanzania) as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Atlantic-Congo
  2. Volta-Congo
  3. Benue-Congo
  4. Bantoid
  5. Southern Bantoid
  6. Narrow Bantu
  7. East Bantu
  8. Northeast Savanna Bantu
  9. Northeast Coastal Bantu
  10. Pare-Taveta
  11. Pareic
  12. Asu (Tanzania)

Related languages

Other languages in the Pareic group:

More about Asu (Tanzania)

Codes: ISO 639-3 asa, Glottolog asut1235. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Asu (Tanzania)

Where is Asu (Tanzania) spoken?

Asu (Tanzania) is spoken in Tanzania and Kenya. Unicode CLDR puts it at 1.2% of the population of Tanzania, which is about 809,545 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Asu (Tanzania)?

Wikidata gives about 500,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 2000). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Which language family is Asu (Tanzania) in?

Glottolog places Asu (Tanzania) in the Atlantic-Congo family, in the branch Volta-Congo, Benue-Congo, Bantoid, Southern Bantoid, Narrow Bantu, East Bantu, Northeast Savanna Bantu, Northeast Coastal Bantu, Pare-Taveta and Pareic.

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