World Language Map

Where is Kumyk spoken?

Kumyk (къумукъ тил) is a Turkic language, spoken in Russia and Kazakhstan. 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
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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 Kumyk is spoken

Kumyk is spoken in 2 countries: Russia and Kazakhstan. 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
Russia0.2%281,642
KazakhstanNot 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, Kumyk 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 Kumyk.

How many people speak Kumyk?

Wikidata gives about 426,000 speakers (2010 Russian census, 2010). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Threatened. Glottolog lists it as threatened: it is still spoken by all generations, but there are signs that the number of speakers is falling.

Where Kumyk sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Turkic
  2. Common Turkic
  3. Kipchak-Turkestan
  4. Kipchak
  5. Northwest Kipchak
  6. West Kipchak
  7. Kaukasus Kipchak
  8. Kumyk

Related languages

Other languages in the Kaukasus Kipchak group:

More about Kumyk

Codes: ISO 639-3 kum, Glottolog kumy1244. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Kumyk

Where is Kumyk spoken?

Kumyk is spoken in Russia and Kazakhstan. Unicode CLDR puts it at 0.2% of the population of Russia, which is about 281,642 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Kumyk?

Wikidata gives about 426,000 speakers (2010 Russian census, 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 Kumyk in?

Glottolog places Kumyk in the Turkic family, in the branch Common Turkic, Kipchak-Turkestan, Kipchak, Northwest Kipchak, West Kipchak and Kaukasus Kipchak.

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