Where Susu is spoken
Susu is spoken in 4 countries: Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal and Sierra Leone. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.
| Country | Share of population | Estimated speakers |
|---|---|---|
| Guinea | 11% | 1,538,482 |
| Guinea-Bissau | Not given | Not given |
| Senegal | Not given | Not given |
| Sierra Leone | Not given | Not 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, Susu 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 Susu.
How many people speak Susu?
Wikidata gives about 2.4 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 26th Edition, 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 Susu sits in the language family tree
Glottolog classifies Susu as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.
- Mande
- Western Mande
- Manding-Kpelle
- Central Mande
- Susu-Yalunka
- Susu
Related languages
Other languages in the Susu-Yalunka group:
More about Susu
Codes: ISO 639-3 sus, Glottolog susu1250. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.
Questions about Susu
Where is Susu spoken?
Susu is spoken in Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal and Sierra Leone. Unicode CLDR puts it at 11% of the population of Guinea, which is about 1,538,482 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.
How many people speak Susu?
Wikidata gives about 2.4 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 26th Edition, 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 Susu in?
Glottolog places Susu in the Mande family, in the branch Western Mande, Manding-Kpelle, Central Mande and Susu-Yalunka.