Where Tsakhur is spoken
Tsakhur is spoken in 2 countries: Azerbaijan and Russia. 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Azerbaijan | 0.2% | 17,040 |
| Russia | 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, Tsakhur 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 Tsakhur.
How many people speak Tsakhur?
Wikidata gives about 23,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 1989). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.
Status: Threatened. Glottolog lists it as threatened: it is still spoken by all generations, but there are signs that the number of speakers is falling.
Where Tsakhur sits in the language family tree
Glottolog classifies Tsakhur as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.
- Nakh-Daghestanian
- Daghestanian
- Lezgic
- Samur
- Western Samur
- Tsakhur
Related languages
Other languages in the Western Samur group:
- Rutul (47,000 speakers)
More about Tsakhur
- Read about Tsakhur on Wikipedia
- Nakh-Daghestanian languages map
- Languages spoken in Azerbaijan
- All languages, A to Z
Codes: ISO 639-3 tkr, Glottolog tsak1249. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.
Questions about Tsakhur
Where is Tsakhur spoken?
Tsakhur is spoken in Azerbaijan and Russia. Unicode CLDR puts it at 0.2% of the population of Azerbaijan, which is about 17,040 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.
How many people speak Tsakhur?
Wikidata gives about 23,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 1989). 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 Tsakhur in?
Glottolog places Tsakhur in the Nakh-Daghestanian family, in the branch Daghestanian, Lezgic, Samur and Western Samur.