World Language Map

Where is Tibetan spoken?

Tibetan (བོད་ཡིག) is a Sino-Tibetan language, spoken in China, Nepal, Bhutan and India. 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 Tibetan is spoken

Tibetan is spoken in 4 countries: China, Nepal, Bhutan 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
China0.2%2,832,080
Nepal0.2%74,694
BhutanNot givenNot given
IndiaNot 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, Tibetan 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 Tibetan.

How many people speak Tibetan?

Wikidata gives about 1.2 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 18th Edition, 1990). 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 Tibetan sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Sino-Tibetan
  2. Bodic
  3. Bodish
  4. Early Old Tibetan
  5. Middle Old Tibetan
  6. Late Old Tibetan
  7. Central Tibetan
  8. Tibetan

More about Tibetan

Codes: ISO 639-3 bod, Glottolog tibe1272. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Tibetan

Where is Tibetan spoken?

Tibetan is spoken in China, Nepal, Bhutan and India. Unicode CLDR puts it at 0.2% of the population of China, which is about 2,832,080 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Tibetan?

Wikidata gives about 1.2 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 18th Edition, 1990). 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 Tibetan in?

Glottolog places Tibetan in the Sino-Tibetan family, in the branch Bodic, Bodish, Early Old Tibetan, Middle Old Tibetan, Late Old Tibetan and Central Tibetan.

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