World Language Map

Where is Phuthi spoken?

Phuthi is an Atlantic-Congo language, spoken in Lesotho and South Africa. 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 Phuthi is spoken

Phuthi is spoken in 2 countries: Lesotho and South Africa.

Country
Lesotho
South Africa

On the map, Phuthi 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 Phuthi.

How many people speak Phuthi?

Wikidata gives about 20,000 first-language speakers (Southern Tekela is alive: reintroducing the Phuthi language, 1999). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Threatened. Glottolog lists it as threatened: it is still spoken by all generations, but there are signs that the number of speakers is falling.

Where Phuthi sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Phuthi 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. Southern Bantu
  9. Nuclear Southern Bantu
  10. Dimsuffix Southern Bantu
  11. Nguni-Tsonga-Copi
  12. Nguni (S.40)
  13. Phuthi

More about Phuthi

Codes: Glottolog phut1246. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Phuthi

Where is Phuthi spoken?

Phuthi is spoken in Lesotho and South Africa. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Phuthi?

Wikidata gives about 20,000 first-language speakers (Southern Tekela is alive: reintroducing the Phuthi language, 1999). 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 Phuthi in?

Glottolog places Phuthi in the Atlantic-Congo family, in the branch Volta-Congo, Benue-Congo, Bantoid, Southern Bantoid, Narrow Bantu, East Bantu, Southern Bantu, Nuclear Southern Bantu, Dimsuffix Southern Bantu, Nguni-Tsonga-Copi and Nguni (S.40).

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