World Language Map

Where is Bonan spoken?

Bonan (མ་ནི་སྐད་ཅི) is a Mongolic-Khitan language, spoken in China and Kazakhstan. 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 Bonan is spoken

Bonan is spoken in 2 countries: China and Kazakhstan.

Country
China
Kazakhstan

On the map, Bonan 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 Bonan.

How many people speak Bonan?

Wikidata gives about 10,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 2017). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Shifting. Glottolog lists it as shifting: the youngest speakers are adults, and children are growing up speaking another language.

Where Bonan sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Mongolic-Khitan
  2. Mongolic
  3. Southern Periphery Mongolic
  4. Shirongol
  5. Baoanic
  6. Bonan

Related languages

Other languages in the Baoanic group:

More about Bonan

Codes: ISO 639-3 peh, Glottolog bona1250. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Bonan

Where is Bonan spoken?

Bonan is spoken in China and Kazakhstan. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Bonan?

Wikidata gives about 10,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 2017). 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 Bonan in?

Glottolog places Bonan in the Mongolic-Khitan family, in the branch Mongolic, Southern Periphery Mongolic, Shirongol and Baoanic.

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