World Language Map

Where is Sylheti spoken?

Sylheti (ꠘꠣꠉꠞꠤ ꠜꠣꠡꠣ) is an Indo-European language, spoken in Bangladesh, India and Myanmar. 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

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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 Sylheti is spoken

Sylheti is spoken in 3 countries: Bangladesh, India and Myanmar. 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
Bangladesh5%8,434,850
IndiaNot givenNot given
MyanmarNot 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, Sylheti 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 Sylheti.

How many people speak Sylheti?

Wikidata gives about 12 million first-language speakers (visualcapitalist.com, 2020). It also lists about 10 million second-language speakers (visualcapitalist.com, 2020). 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 Sylheti sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Sylheti 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 Eastern zone
  8. Oriya-Gauda-Kamrupa
  9. Gauda-Kamrupa
  10. Gauda-Banga
  11. Eastern Bengali
  12. Sylheti

Related languages

Other languages in the Eastern Bengali group:

More about Sylheti

Codes: ISO 639-3 syl, Glottolog sylh1242. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Sylheti

Where is Sylheti spoken?

Sylheti is spoken in Bangladesh, India and Myanmar. Unicode CLDR puts it at 5% of the population of Bangladesh, which is about 8,434,850 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Sylheti?

Wikidata gives about 12 million first-language speakers (visualcapitalist.com, 2020). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled. It also lists about 10 million second-language speakers (visualcapitalist.com, 2020).

Which language family is Sylheti in?

Glottolog places Sylheti in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Indo-Iranian, Indo-Aryan, Middle-Modern Indo-Aryan, Continental Indo-Aryan, Indo-Aryan Eastern zone, Oriya-Gauda-Kamrupa, Gauda-Kamrupa, Gauda-Banga and Eastern Bengali.

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