World Language Map

Where is Mambai spoken?

Mambai is an Atlantic-Congo language, spoken in Cameroon and Chad. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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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 Mambai is spoken

Mambai is spoken in 2 countries: Cameroon and Chad.

Country
Cameroon
Chad

On the map, Mambai 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 Mambai.

How many people speak Mambai?

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 Mambai sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Atlantic-Congo
  2. Volta-Congo
  3. North Volta-Congo
  4. Cameroun-Ubangian
  5. Mbumic
  6. Northern Mbum
  7. Tupuri-Mundang-Mambai
  8. Mambai

Related languages

Other languages in the Tupuri-Mundang-Mambai group:

More about Mambai

Codes: ISO 639-3 mcs, Glottolog mamb1294. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Mambai

Where is Mambai spoken?

Mambai is spoken in Cameroon and Chad. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

Which language family is Mambai in?

Glottolog places Mambai in the Atlantic-Congo family, in the branch Volta-Congo, North Volta-Congo, Cameroun-Ubangian, Mbumic, Northern Mbum and Tupuri-Mundang-Mambai.

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