World Language Map

Where is Northern Tshwa spoken?

Northern Tshwa is a Khoe-Kwadi language, spoken in Botswana and Zimbabwe. 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

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  • 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 Tshwa is spoken

Northern Tshwa is spoken in 2 countries: Botswana and Zimbabwe.

Country
Botswana
Zimbabwe

On the map, Northern Tshwa 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 Tshwa.

How many people speak Northern Tshwa?

Wikidata holds no speaker count for this language.

Status: Shifting. Glottolog lists it as shifting: the youngest speakers are adults, and children are growing up speaking another language.

Where Northern Tshwa sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Khoe-Kwadi
  2. Khoe
  3. Non-Khoekhoe
  4. Ost-Kxoe
  5. Tshwa Khoe
  6. Northern Tshwa

Related languages

Other languages in the Tshwa Khoe group:

More about Northern Tshwa

Codes: ISO 639-3 hio, Glottolog tsoa1238. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Northern Tshwa

Where is Northern Tshwa spoken?

Northern Tshwa is spoken in Botswana and Zimbabwe. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

Which language family is Northern Tshwa in?

Glottolog places Northern Tshwa in the Khoe-Kwadi family, in the branch Khoe, Non-Khoekhoe, Ost-Kxoe and Tshwa Khoe.

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