World Language Map

Where is Northern Gumuz spoken?

Northern Gumuz is a Gumuz language, spoken in Ethiopia and Sudan. 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 Northern Gumuz is spoken

Northern Gumuz is spoken in 2 countries: Ethiopia and Sudan.

Country
Ethiopia
Sudan

On the map, Northern Gumuz 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 Northern Gumuz.

How many people speak Northern Gumuz?

Wikidata gives about 219,000 speakers (ethnologue.com, 2007). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

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

Where Northern Gumuz sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Gumuz
  2. Nuclear Gumuz
  3. Northern Gumuz

Related languages

Other languages in the Nuclear Gumuz group:

More about Northern Gumuz

Codes: ISO 639-3 guk, Glottolog gumu1244. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Northern Gumuz

Where is Northern Gumuz spoken?

Northern Gumuz is spoken in Ethiopia and Sudan. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Northern Gumuz?

Wikidata gives about 219,000 speakers (ethnologue.com, 2007). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Which language family is Northern Gumuz in?

Glottolog places Northern Gumuz in the Gumuz family, in the branch Nuclear Gumuz.

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