World Language Map

Where is Shona spoken?

Shona (ChiShona) is an Atlantic-Congo language, spoken in Zimbabwe, Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa and 1 more. 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 Shona is spoken

Shona is spoken in 5 countries: Zimbabwe, Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa and 1 more. 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
Zimbabwe81%13,891,824
BotswanaNot givenNot given
MozambiqueNot givenNot given
South AfricaNot givenNot given
ZambiaNot 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, Shona 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 Shona.

How many people speak Shona?

Wikidata gives about 8.3 million first-language speakers (Nationalencyklopedin, 2007). 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 Shona sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Shona 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. Shona (S.10)
  10. Core Shona
  11. Plateau Shona
  12. Central Shona
  13. Shona

Related languages

Other languages in the Central Shona group:

More about Shona

Codes: ISO 639-3 sna, Glottolog shon1251. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Shona

Where is Shona spoken?

Shona is spoken in Zimbabwe, Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa and 1 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 81% of the population of Zimbabwe, which is about 13,891,824 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Shona?

Wikidata gives about 8.3 million first-language speakers (Nationalencyklopedin, 2007). 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 Shona in?

Glottolog places Shona in the Atlantic-Congo family, in the branch Volta-Congo, Benue-Congo, Bantoid, Southern Bantoid, Narrow Bantu, East Bantu, Southern Bantu, Shona (S.10), Core Shona, Plateau Shona and Central Shona.

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