Where is Najdi Arabic spoken?

Najdi Arabic is an Afro-Asiatic language, spoken in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Israel and 7 more. 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 Najdi Arabic is spoken

Najdi Arabic is spoken in 11 countries: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Israel and 7 more. 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
Saudi Arabia3%1,096,332
IranNot givenNot given
IraqNot givenNot given
IsraelNot givenNot given
JordanNot givenNot given
KuwaitNot givenNot given
LebanonNot givenNot given
SyriaNot givenNot given
TurkeyNot givenNot given
United Arab EmiratesNot givenNot given
YemenNot givenNot given

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, Najdi Arabic 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 Najdi Arabic.

How many people speak Najdi Arabic?

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 Najdi Arabic sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Afro-Asiatic
  2. Semitic
  3. West Semitic
  4. Central Semitic
  5. Arabian
  6. Arabic
  7. Arabian Peninsula Arabic
  8. North Arabian Beduin Arabic
  9. Najdi Arabic

Related languages

Other languages in the North Arabian Beduin Arabic group:

More about Najdi Arabic

Codes: ISO 639-3 ars, Glottolog najd1235. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Najdi Arabic

Where is Najdi Arabic spoken?

Najdi Arabic is spoken in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Israel and 7 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 3% of the population of Saudi Arabia, which is about 1,096,332 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

Which language family is Najdi Arabic in?

Glottolog places Najdi Arabic in the Afro-Asiatic family, in the branch Semitic, West Semitic, Central Semitic, Arabian, Arabic, Arabian Peninsula Arabic and North Arabian Beduin Arabic.

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