World Language Map

Where is Luba-Katanga spoken?

Luba-Katanga (Kiluba) is an Atlantic-Congo language, spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 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 Luba-Katanga is spoken

Luba-Katanga is spoken in one country: the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 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
Democratic Republic of the Congo2.3%2,654,269

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, Luba-Katanga 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 Luba-Katanga.

How many people speak Luba-Katanga?

Wikidata holds no speaker count for this language. The table above has rough per-country estimates from Unicode CLDR.

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 Luba-Katanga sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Luba-Katanga 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. Central-Western Bantu
  8. Luban
  9. Luba-Kaonde
  10. Kaonde-Shaba-Sanga
  11. Luba-Katanga

Related languages

Other languages in the Kaonde-Shaba-Sanga group:

More about Luba-Katanga

Codes: ISO 639-3 lub, Glottolog luba1250. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Luba-Katanga

Where is Luba-Katanga spoken?

Luba-Katanga is spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Unicode CLDR puts it at 2.3% of the population of Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is about 2,654,269 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

Which language family is Luba-Katanga in?

Glottolog places Luba-Katanga in the Atlantic-Congo family, in the branch Volta-Congo, Benue-Congo, Bantoid, Southern Bantoid, Narrow Bantu, Central-Western Bantu, Luban, Luba-Kaonde and Kaonde-Shaba-Sanga.

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