World Language Map

Where is Leh Ladakhi spoken?

Leh Ladakhi is a Sino-Tibetan language, spoken in China and India. 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 Leh Ladakhi is spoken

Leh Ladakhi is spoken in 2 countries: China and India.

Country
China
India

On the map, Leh Ladakhi 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 Leh Ladakhi.

How many people speak Leh Ladakhi?

Wikidata gives about 15,000 speakers (web.archive.org, 2011). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Shifting. Glottolog lists it as shifting: the youngest speakers are adults, and children are growing up speaking another language.

Where Leh Ladakhi sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Sino-Tibetan
  2. Bodic
  3. Bodish
  4. Early Old Tibetan
  5. Western Archaic Tibetan
  6. Kenhatic
  7. Leh Ladakhi

Related languages

Other languages in the Kenhatic group:

More about Leh Ladakhi

Codes: ISO 639-3 lbj, Glottolog lada1244. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Leh Ladakhi

Where is Leh Ladakhi spoken?

Leh Ladakhi is spoken in China and India. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Leh Ladakhi?

Wikidata gives about 15,000 speakers (web.archive.org, 2011). 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 Leh Ladakhi in?

Glottolog places Leh Ladakhi in the Sino-Tibetan family, in the branch Bodic, Bodish, Early Old Tibetan, Western Archaic Tibetan and Kenhatic.

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