World Language Map

Where is Mbesa spoken?

Mbesa 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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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 Mbesa is spoken

Mbesa is spoken in one country: the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Country
Democratic Republic of the Congo

On the map, Mbesa 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 Mbesa.

How many people speak Mbesa?

Wikidata holds no speaker count for this language.

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

Where Mbesa sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Mbesa 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. North Zaire River
  9. Inner Basin Bantu
  10. Keleic
  11. Mbesa

More about Mbesa

Codes: ISO 639-3 zms, Glottolog mbes1238. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Mbesa

Where is Mbesa spoken?

Mbesa is spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

Which language family is Mbesa in?

Glottolog places Mbesa in the Atlantic-Congo family, in the branch Volta-Congo, Benue-Congo, Bantoid, Southern Bantoid, Narrow Bantu, Central-Western Bantu, North Zaire River, Inner Basin Bantu and Keleic.

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