World Language Map

Where is Ntomba spoken?

Ntomba 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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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 Ntomba is spoken

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

Country
Democratic Republic of the Congo

On the map, Ntomba 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 Ntomba.

How many people speak Ntomba?

Wikidata gives about 100,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 1980). 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 Ntomba sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Ntomba 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. Cuvette
  11. Mongoic
  12. Bolia-Ntomba
  13. Ntomba

Related languages

Other languages in the Bolia-Ntomba group:

More about Ntomba

Codes: ISO 639-3 nto, Glottolog ntom1248. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Ntomba

Where is Ntomba spoken?

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

How many people speak Ntomba?

Wikidata gives about 100,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 1980). 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 Ntomba in?

Glottolog places Ntomba 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, Cuvette, Mongoic and Bolia-Ntomba.

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