World Language Map

Where is Bassa spoken?

Bassa is a Kru language, spoken in Liberia and Sierra Leone. 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 Bassa is spoken

Bassa is spoken in 2 countries: Liberia and Sierra Leone. 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
Liberia14%761,215
Sierra LeoneNot 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, Bassa 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 Bassa.

How many people speak Bassa?

Wikidata gives about 420,000 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given). 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 Bassa sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Bassa as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Kru
  2. Greater Western Kru
  3. Western Kru
  4. Wee-Bassa-Klao
  5. Bassa-Klao
  6. Bassaic
  7. Bassa-Gbee
  8. Bassa

Related languages

Other languages in the Bassa-Gbee group:

More about Bassa

Codes: ISO 639-3 bsq, Glottolog nucl1418. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Bassa

Where is Bassa spoken?

Bassa is spoken in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Unicode CLDR puts it at 14% of the population of Liberia, which is about 761,215 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Bassa?

Wikidata gives about 420,000 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given). 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 Bassa in?

Glottolog places Bassa in the Kru family, in the branch Greater Western Kru, Western Kru, Wee-Bassa-Klao, Bassa-Klao, Bassaic and Bassa-Gbee.

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