World Language Map

Where is Somali spoken?

Somali (𐒖𐒍 𐒈𐒝𐒑𐒛𐒐𐒘) is an Afro-Asiatic language, spoken in Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Djibouti and 2 more. 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 Somali is spoken

Somali is spoken in 6 countries: Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Djibouti and 2 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
Somalia78%10,153,494
Ethiopia6%7,113,000
Kenya1.3%757,203
Djibouti41%407,939
United Kingdom0.2%136,918
Canada0.2%62,072

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, Somali 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 Somali.

How many people speak Somali?

Wikidata gives about 16.2 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 Somali sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Afro-Asiatic
  2. Cushitic
  3. East Cushitic
  4. Lowland East Cushitic
  5. Southern Lowland East Cushitic
  6. Mainstream Lowland East Cushitic
  7. Omo-Tana
  8. Eastern Omo-Tana
  9. Somali

Related languages

Other languages in the Eastern Omo-Tana group:

More about Somali

Codes: ISO 639-3 som, Glottolog soma1255. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Somali

Where is Somali spoken?

Somali is spoken in Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Djibouti and 2 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 78% of the population of Somalia, which is about 10,153,494 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Somali?

Wikidata gives about 16.2 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 Somali in?

Glottolog places Somali in the Afro-Asiatic family, in the branch Cushitic, East Cushitic, Lowland East Cushitic, Southern Lowland East Cushitic, Mainstream Lowland East Cushitic, Omo-Tana and Eastern Omo-Tana.

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