Where is Mali spoken?

Mali is a Baining language, spoken in Papua New Guinea. It is marked on the map by a ringed point.

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The filter only changes what is drawn. Tap the map to list every language at a spot, whichever family is shown. You can also pick any family from its own page.

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 Mali is spoken

Mali is spoken in one country: Papua New Guinea.

Mali has no area on the map because no open area map covers it. The ringed point is the position Glottolog gives for the language.

How many people speak Mali?

Wikidata holds no speaker count for this language.

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 Mali sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Baining
  2. Southern Baining
  3. Mali-Simbali
  4. Mali

Related languages

Other languages in the Mali-Simbali group:

More about Mali

Codes: ISO 639-3 gcc, Glottolog mali1284. Glottolog macroarea: Papunesia.

Questions about Mali

Where is Mali spoken?

Mali is spoken in Papua New Guinea. On the map it is shown as a single point, because no open area map covers it.

Which language family is Mali in?

Glottolog places Mali in the Baining family, in the branch Southern Baining and Mali-Simbali.

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