World Language Map

Where is Shina spoken?

Shina (ݜݨیاٗ) is an Indo-European language, spoken in India and Pakistan. 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 Shina is spoken

Shina is spoken in 2 countries: India and Pakistan.

Country
India
Pakistan

On the map, Shina 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 Shina.

How many people speak Shina?

Wikidata gives about 720,000 first-language speakers (web.archive.org, 2018). 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 Shina sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Indo-European
  2. Classical Indo-European
  3. Indo-Iranian
  4. Indo-Aryan
  5. Middle-Modern Indo-Aryan
  6. Eastern Dardic
  7. Nuclear Eastern Dardic
  8. Shinaic
  9. Shina

Related languages

Other languages in the Shinaic group:

More about Shina

Codes: ISO 639-3 scl, Glottolog shin1264. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Shina

Where is Shina spoken?

Shina is spoken in India and Pakistan. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Shina?

Wikidata gives about 720,000 first-language speakers (web.archive.org, 2018). 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 Shina in?

Glottolog places Shina in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Indo-Iranian, Indo-Aryan, Middle-Modern Indo-Aryan, Eastern Dardic, Nuclear Eastern Dardic and Shinaic.

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