World Language Map

Where is Dungan spoken?

Dungan is a Sino-Tibetan language, spoken in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and 1 more. 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 Dungan is spoken

Dungan is spoken in 5 countries: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and 1 more.

Country
Kazakhstan
Kyrgyzstan
Tajikistan
Turkmenistan
Uzbekistan

On the map, Dungan 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 Dungan.

How many people speak Dungan?

Wikidata gives about 41,000 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given, 2001). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Threatened. Glottolog lists it as threatened: it is still spoken by all generations, but there are signs that the number of speakers is falling.

Where Dungan sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Sino-Tibetan
  2. Sinitic
  3. Classical-Middle-Modern Sinitic
  4. Middle-Modern Sinitic
  5. Northern Chinese
  6. Mandarinic
  7. Zhongyuan
  8. Dungan

Related languages

Other languages in the Zhongyuan group:

More about Dungan

Codes: ISO 639-3 dng, Glottolog dung1253. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Dungan

Where is Dungan spoken?

Dungan is spoken in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and 1 more. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Dungan?

Wikidata gives about 41,000 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given, 2001). 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 Dungan in?

Glottolog places Dungan in the Sino-Tibetan family, in the branch Sinitic, Classical-Middle-Modern Sinitic, Middle-Modern Sinitic, Northern Chinese, Mandarinic and Zhongyuan.

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