World Language Map

Where is Sindhi spoken?

Sindhi (સિંધી) is an Indo-European language, spoken in Pakistan and India. 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 Sindhi is spoken

Sindhi is spoken in 2 countries: Pakistan and India. 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
Pakistan15%37,854,600
India0.4%5,636,520

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, Sindhi 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 Sindhi.

How many people speak Sindhi?

Wikidata gives about 24.6 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 Sindhi sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Sindhi 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. Continental Indo-Aryan
  7. Indo-Aryan Northwestern zone
  8. Sindhi-Lahnda
  9. Sindhic
  10. Sindhi-Kachchi
  11. Sindhi

Related languages

Other languages in the Sindhi-Kachchi group:

More about Sindhi

Codes: ISO 639-3 snd, Glottolog sind1272. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Sindhi

Where is Sindhi spoken?

Sindhi is spoken in Pakistan and India. Unicode CLDR puts it at 15% of the population of Pakistan, which is about 37,854,600 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Sindhi?

Wikidata gives about 24.6 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 Sindhi in?

Glottolog places Sindhi in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Indo-Iranian, Indo-Aryan, Middle-Modern Indo-Aryan, Continental Indo-Aryan, Indo-Aryan Northwestern zone, Sindhi-Lahnda, Sindhic and Sindhi-Kachchi.

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