World Language Map

Where is Kinyarwanda spoken?

Kinyarwanda (Ikinyarwanda) is an Atlantic-Congo language, spoken in Rwanda, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi and 1 more. The outlined area on the map shows where.

Tap or scroll to load the interactive map

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 Kinyarwanda is spoken

Kinyarwanda is spoken in 5 countries: Rwanda, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi and 1 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
Rwanda77%10,489,941
Uganda2.1%1,034,943
Democratic Republic of the Congo0.4%438,531
BurundiNot givenNot given
TanzaniaNot 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, Kinyarwanda 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 Kinyarwanda.

How many people speak Kinyarwanda?

Wikidata gives about 12.1 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). 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 Kinyarwanda sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Atlantic-Congo
  2. Volta-Congo
  3. Benue-Congo
  4. Bantoid
  5. Southern Bantoid
  6. Narrow Bantu
  7. East Bantu
  8. Northeast Savanna Bantu
  9. Great Lakes Bantu
  10. Western Lakes Bantu
  11. Kivu
  12. West Highlands Kivu
  13. Kinyarwanda

Related languages

Other languages in the West Highlands Kivu group:

More about Kinyarwanda

Codes: ISO 639-3 kin, Glottolog kiny1244. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Kinyarwanda

Where is Kinyarwanda spoken?

Kinyarwanda is spoken in Rwanda, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi and 1 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 77% of the population of Rwanda, which is about 10,489,941 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Kinyarwanda?

Wikidata gives about 12.1 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). 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 Kinyarwanda in?

Glottolog places Kinyarwanda in the Atlantic-Congo family, in the branch Volta-Congo, Benue-Congo, Bantoid, Southern Bantoid, Narrow Bantu, East Bantu, Northeast Savanna Bantu, Great Lakes Bantu, Western Lakes Bantu, Kivu and West Highlands Kivu.

Embed this map

Copy this code into your web page. It is free to use. Please keep the link under the map, as it is how people find where the map comes from.