World Language Map

Where is Konzo spoken?

Konzo is an Atlantic-Congo language, spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda. 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
  • 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 Konzo is spoken

Konzo is spoken in 2 countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda.

Country
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Uganda

On the map, Konzo 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 Konzo.

How many people speak Konzo?

Wikidata gives about 609,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 2002). 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 Konzo sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Konzo 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. Rwenzori
  12. Konzo

Related languages

Other languages in the Rwenzori group:

More about Konzo

Codes: ISO 639-3 koo, Glottolog konz1239. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Konzo

Where is Konzo spoken?

Konzo is spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Konzo?

Wikidata gives about 609,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 2002). 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 Konzo in?

Glottolog places Konzo 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 and Rwenzori.

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