World Language Map

Where is Sereer spoken?

Sereer (Seereer) is an Atlantic-Congo language, spoken in Senegal and the Gambia. 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 Sereer is spoken

Sereer is spoken in 2 countries: Senegal and the Gambia. 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
Senegal11%2,073,225
GambiaNot 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, Sereer 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 Sereer.

How many people speak Sereer?

Wikidata gives about 1.2 million 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 Sereer sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Atlantic-Congo
  2. North-Central Atlantic
  3. Fula-Sereer
  4. Sereer

More about Sereer

Codes: ISO 639-3 srr, Glottolog sere1260. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Sereer

Where is Sereer spoken?

Sereer is spoken in Senegal and the Gambia. Unicode CLDR puts it at 11% of the population of Senegal, which is about 2,073,225 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Sereer?

Wikidata gives about 1.2 million 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 Sereer in?

Glottolog places Sereer in the Atlantic-Congo family, in the branch North-Central Atlantic and Fula-Sereer.

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