World Language Map

Where is Tongwe spoken?

Tongwe is an Atlantic-Congo language, spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Tanzania. 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 Tongwe is spoken

Tongwe is spoken in 2 countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Tanzania.

Country
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Tanzania

On the map, Tongwe 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 Tongwe.

How many people speak Tongwe?

Wikidata gives about 32,000 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given). 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 Tongwe sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Atlantic-Congo
  2. Volta-Congo
  3. Benue-Congo
  4. Bantoid
  5. Southern Bantoid
  6. Narrow Bantu
  7. East Bantu
  8. Northeast Savanna Bantu
  9. Unclassified Northeast Savanna Bantu
  10. Bende-Tongwe
  11. Tongwe

Related languages

Other languages in the Bende-Tongwe group:

More about Tongwe

Codes: ISO 639-3 tny, Glottolog tong1320. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Tongwe

Where is Tongwe spoken?

Tongwe is spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Tanzania. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Tongwe?

Wikidata gives about 32,000 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given). 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 Tongwe in?

Glottolog places Tongwe in the Atlantic-Congo family, in the branch Volta-Congo, Benue-Congo, Bantoid, Southern Bantoid, Narrow Bantu, East Bantu, Northeast Savanna Bantu, Unclassified Northeast Savanna Bantu and Bende-Tongwe.

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