World Language Map

Where is Nuer spoken?

Nuer is a Nilotic language, spoken in South Sudan and Ethiopia. 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 Nuer is spoken

Nuer is spoken in 2 countries: South Sudan and Ethiopia. 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
South Sudan5.6%711,407
EthiopiaNot 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, Nuer 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 Nuer.

How many people speak Nuer?

Wikidata gives about 900,000 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given). 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 Nuer sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Nilotic
  2. Western Nilotic
  3. Dinka-Nuer
  4. Nuer-Reel
  5. Nuer

Related languages

Other languages in the Nuer-Reel group:

More about Nuer

Codes: ISO 639-3 nus, Glottolog nuer1246. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Nuer

Where is Nuer spoken?

Nuer is spoken in South Sudan and Ethiopia. Unicode CLDR puts it at 5.6% of the population of South Sudan, which is about 711,407 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Nuer?

Wikidata gives about 900,000 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given). 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 Nuer in?

Glottolog places Nuer in the Nilotic family, in the branch Western Nilotic, Dinka-Nuer and Nuer-Reel.

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