World Language Map

Where is Dyula spoken?

Dyula is a Mande language, spoken in Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and Mali. 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

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  • 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 Dyula is spoken

Dyula is spoken in 3 countries: Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and Mali. 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
Burkina Faso32%7,373,504
Ivory CoastNot givenNot given
MaliNot 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, Dyula 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 Dyula.

How many people speak Dyula?

Wikidata gives about 2.7 million 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 Dyula sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Mande
  2. Western Mande
  3. Manding-Kpelle
  4. Central Mande
  5. Manding-Jogo
  6. Manding-Vai
  7. Manding-Mokole
  8. Manding
  9. East Manding
  10. Dyula

Related languages

Other languages in the East Manding group:

More about Dyula

Codes: ISO 639-3 dyu, Glottolog dyul1238. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Dyula

Where is Dyula spoken?

Dyula is spoken in Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and Mali. Unicode CLDR puts it at 32% of the population of Burkina Faso, which is about 7,373,504 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Dyula?

Wikidata gives about 2.7 million 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 Dyula in?

Glottolog places Dyula in the Mande family, in the branch Western Mande, Manding-Kpelle, Central Mande, Manding-Jogo, Manding-Vai, Manding-Mokole, Manding and East Manding.

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