World Language Map

Where is Nyanja spoken?

Nyanja (Chilankhulo cha Chichewa) is an Atlantic-Congo language, spoken in Malawi, Zambia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and 2 more. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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The filter only changes what is drawn. Tap the map to list every language at a spot, whichever family is shown. You can also pick any family from its own page.

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 Nyanja is spoken

Nyanja is spoken in 6 countries: Malawi, Zambia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and 2 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
Malawi63%13,710,879
Zambia19%3,951,829
Mozambique2.6%867,126
Zimbabwe1.9%325,858
EswatiniNot givenNot given
TanzaniaNot 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, Nyanja 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 Nyanja.

How many people speak Nyanja?

Wikidata gives about 12 million first-language speakers (Nationalencyklopedin, 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 Nyanja sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Nyanja 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. East Bantu
  8. Tumbuka-Sena-Nyanja
  9. Sena-Nyanja
  10. Nyanjaic
  11. Nyanja

Related languages

Other languages in the Nyanjaic group:

More about Nyanja

Codes: ISO 639-3 nya, Glottolog nyan1308. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Nyanja

Where is Nyanja spoken?

Nyanja is spoken in Malawi, Zambia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and 2 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 63% of the population of Malawi, which is about 13,710,879 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Nyanja?

Wikidata gives about 12 million first-language speakers (Nationalencyklopedin, 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 Nyanja in?

Glottolog places Nyanja in the Atlantic-Congo family, in the branch Volta-Congo, Benue-Congo, Bantoid, Southern Bantoid, Narrow Bantu, East Bantu, Tumbuka-Sena-Nyanja, Sena-Nyanja and Nyanjaic.

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