World Language Map

Where is Saya spoken?

Saya is an Afro-Asiatic language, spoken in Nigeria. 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 Saya is spoken

Saya is spoken in one country: Nigeria.

Country
Nigeria

On the map, Saya 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 Saya.

How many people speak Saya?

Wikidata gives about 300,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 2013). 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 Saya sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Afro-Asiatic
  2. Chadic
  3. West Chadic
  4. West Chadic B
  5. West Chadic B.3
  6. South Bauchi West
  7. Southwest South Bauchi
  8. Zakse-Saya
  9. Saya

Related languages

Other languages in the Zakse-Saya group:

More about Saya

Codes: ISO 639-3 say, Glottolog saya1246. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Saya

Where is Saya spoken?

Saya is spoken in Nigeria. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Saya?

Wikidata gives about 300,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 2013). 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 Saya in?

Glottolog places Saya in the Afro-Asiatic family, in the branch Chadic, West Chadic, West Chadic B, West Chadic B.3, South Bauchi West, Southwest South Bauchi and Zakse-Saya.

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