World Language Map

Where is Khams Tibetan spoken?

Khams Tibetan is a Sino-Tibetan language, spoken in China, India and Myanmar. 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 Khams Tibetan is spoken

Khams Tibetan is spoken in 3 countries: China, India and Myanmar.

Country
China
India
Myanmar

On the map, Khams Tibetan 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 Khams Tibetan.

How many people speak Khams Tibetan?

Wikidata gives about 1.5 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 Khams Tibetan sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Sino-Tibetan
  2. Bodic
  3. Bodish
  4. Early Old Tibetan
  5. Middle Old Tibetan
  6. Late Old Tibetan
  7. Kham-Hor
  8. Khams Tibetan

Related languages

Other languages in the Kham-Hor group:

More about Khams Tibetan

Codes: ISO 639-3 khg, Glottolog kham1282. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Khams Tibetan

Where is Khams Tibetan spoken?

Khams Tibetan is spoken in China, India and Myanmar. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Khams Tibetan?

Wikidata gives about 1.5 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 Khams Tibetan in?

Glottolog places Khams Tibetan in the Sino-Tibetan family, in the branch Bodic, Bodish, Early Old Tibetan, Middle Old Tibetan, Late Old Tibetan and Kham-Hor.

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