World Language Map

Where is Kirghiz spoken?

Kirghiz (Кыргыз тили) is a Turkic language, spoken in Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, China, Kazakhstan and 2 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 Kirghiz is spoken

Kirghiz is spoken in 6 countries: Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, China, Kazakhstan and 2 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
Kyrgyzstan48%2,962,608
AfghanistanNot givenNot given
ChinaNot givenNot given
KazakhstanNot givenNot given
TajikistanNot givenNot given
UzbekistanNot 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, Kirghiz 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 Kirghiz.

How many people speak Kirghiz?

Wikidata gives about 4.6 million speakers (Ethnologue, 2009). 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 Kirghiz sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Kirghiz 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. East Kipchak
  7. Kirghiz

Related languages

Other languages in the East Kipchak group:

More about Kirghiz

Codes: ISO 639-3 kir, Glottolog kirg1245. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Kirghiz

Where is Kirghiz spoken?

Kirghiz is spoken in Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, China, Kazakhstan and 2 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 48% of the population of Kyrgyzstan, which is about 2,962,608 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Kirghiz?

Wikidata gives about 4.6 million speakers (Ethnologue, 2009). 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 Kirghiz in?

Glottolog places Kirghiz in the Turkic family, in the branch Common Turkic, Kipchak-Turkestan, Kipchak, Southeast Kipchak and East Kipchak.

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