World Language Map

Where is Kara-Kalpak spoken?

Kara-Kalpak (Қарақалпақ тили) is a Turkic language, spoken in Uzbekistan, Iran, Turkey, Turkmenistan and 3 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
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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 Kara-Kalpak is spoken

Kara-Kalpak is spoken in 7 countries: Uzbekistan, Iran, Turkey, Turkmenistan and 3 more. 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
Uzbekistan2.1%766,933
Iran0.7%592,192
Turkey0.1%84,120
Turkmenistan0.1%5,744
AfghanistanNot givenNot given
KazakhstanNot givenNot given
KyrgyzstanNot 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, Kara-Kalpak 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 Kara-Kalpak.

How many people speak Kara-Kalpak?

Wikidata gives about 583,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 2010). 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 Kara-Kalpak sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Kara-Kalpak as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Turkic
  2. Common Turkic
  3. Kipchak-Turkestan
  4. Kipchak
  5. Southeast Kipchak
  6. South Kipchak
  7. Kara-Kalpak

Related languages

Other languages in the South Kipchak group:

More about Kara-Kalpak

Codes: ISO 639-3 kaa, Glottolog kara1467. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Kara-Kalpak

Where is Kara-Kalpak spoken?

Kara-Kalpak is spoken in Uzbekistan, Iran, Turkey, Turkmenistan and 3 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 2.1% of the population of Uzbekistan, which is about 766,933 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Kara-Kalpak?

Wikidata gives about 583,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 2010). 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 Kara-Kalpak in?

Glottolog places Kara-Kalpak in the Turkic family, in the branch Common Turkic, Kipchak-Turkestan, Kipchak, Southeast Kipchak and South Kipchak.

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