World Language Map

Where is Sanaani Arabic spoken?

Sanaani Arabic is an Afro-Asiatic language, spoken in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. 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 Sanaani Arabic is spoken

Sanaani Arabic is spoken in 2 countries: Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

Country
Saudi Arabia
Yemen

On the map, Sanaani Arabic 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 Sanaani Arabic.

How many people speak Sanaani Arabic?

Wikidata gives about 11.4 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). 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 Sanaani Arabic sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Afro-Asiatic
  2. Semitic
  3. West Semitic
  4. Central Semitic
  5. Arabian
  6. Arabic
  7. Arabian Peninsula Arabic
  8. Judeo-Muslim Sanaani Arabic
  9. Sanaani Arabic

Related languages

Other languages in the Judeo-Muslim Sanaani Arabic group:

More about Sanaani Arabic

Codes: ISO 639-3 ayn, Glottolog sana1295. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Sanaani Arabic

Where is Sanaani Arabic spoken?

Sanaani Arabic is spoken in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Sanaani Arabic?

Wikidata gives about 11.4 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). 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 Sanaani Arabic in?

Glottolog places Sanaani Arabic in the Afro-Asiatic family, in the branch Semitic, West Semitic, Central Semitic, Arabian, Arabic, Arabian Peninsula Arabic and Judeo-Muslim Sanaani Arabic.

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