World Language Map

Where is Masai spoken?

Masai is a Nilotic language, spoken in Tanzania and Kenya. 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 Masai is spoken

Masai is spoken in 2 countries: Tanzania and Kenya. 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
Tanzania1.5%1,011,932
Kenya1.6%931,942

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, Masai 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 Masai.

How many people speak Masai?

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

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where Masai sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Nilotic
  2. Eastern Nilotic
  3. Teso-Lotuxo-Maa
  4. Lotuxo-Maa
  5. Ongamo-Maa
  6. Nuclear Maa
  7. Masai

Related languages

Other languages in the Nuclear Maa group:

More about Masai

Codes: ISO 639-3 mas, Glottolog masa1300. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Masai

Where is Masai spoken?

Masai is spoken in Tanzania and Kenya. Unicode CLDR puts it at 1.5% of the population of Tanzania, which is about 1,011,932 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

Which language family is Masai in?

Glottolog places Masai in the Nilotic family, in the branch Eastern Nilotic, Teso-Lotuxo-Maa, Lotuxo-Maa, Ongamo-Maa and Nuclear Maa.

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