World Language Map

Where is Lepcha spoken?

Lepcha is a Sino-Tibetan language, spoken in Bhutan, India and Nepal. 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 Lepcha is spoken

Lepcha is spoken in 3 countries: Bhutan, India and Nepal. 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
Bhutan3.9%34,497
IndiaNot givenNot given
NepalNot 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, Lepcha 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 Lepcha.

How many people speak Lepcha?

Wikidata gives about 67,000 speakers (ethnologue.com, 2011). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Moribund. Glottolog lists it as moribund: the youngest speakers are middle-aged or older, and children are no longer learning it.

Where Lepcha sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Sino-Tibetan
  2. Himalayish
  3. Lepcha

More about Lepcha

Codes: ISO 639-3 lep, Glottolog lepc1244. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Lepcha

Where is Lepcha spoken?

Lepcha is spoken in Bhutan, India and Nepal. Unicode CLDR puts it at 3.9% of the population of Bhutan, which is about 34,497 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Lepcha?

Wikidata gives about 67,000 speakers (ethnologue.com, 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 Lepcha in?

Glottolog places Lepcha in the Sino-Tibetan family, in the branch Himalayish.

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