World Language Map

Where is Gulf Arabic spoken?

Gulf Arabic is an Afro-Asiatic language, spoken in Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and 5 more. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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The filter only changes what is drawn. Tap the map to list every language at a spot, whichever family is shown. You can also pick any family from its own page.

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 Gulf Arabic is spoken

Gulf Arabic is spoken in 9 countries: Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and 5 more.

Country
Bahrain
Iran
Iraq
Kuwait
Oman
Qatar
Saudi Arabia
United Arab Emirates
Yemen

On the map, Gulf Arabic 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 Gulf Arabic.

How many people speak Gulf Arabic?

Wikidata holds no speaker count for this language.

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

Where Gulf Arabic sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Afro-Asiatic
  2. Semitic
  3. West Semitic
  4. Central Semitic
  5. Arabian
  6. Arabic
  7. Arabian Peninsula Arabic
  8. North Arabian Beduin Arabic
  9. Gulf Arabic

Related languages

Other languages in the North Arabian Beduin Arabic group:

More about Gulf Arabic

Codes: ISO 639-3 afb, Glottolog gulf1241. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Gulf Arabic

Where is Gulf Arabic spoken?

Gulf Arabic is spoken in Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and 5 more. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

Which language family is Gulf Arabic in?

Glottolog places Gulf Arabic in the Afro-Asiatic family, in the branch Semitic, West Semitic, Central Semitic, Arabian, Arabic, Arabian Peninsula Arabic and North Arabian Beduin Arabic.

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