World Language Map

Where is West Central Oromo spoken?

West Central Oromo is an Afro-Asiatic language, spoken in Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Sudan. 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 West Central Oromo is spoken

West Central Oromo is spoken in 4 countries: Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Sudan. 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
Ethiopia32%37,936,000
Kenya0.5%273,758
Somalia0.4%54,673
SudanNot 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, West Central Oromo 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 West Central Oromo.

How many people speak West Central Oromo?

Wikidata holds no speaker count for this language. The table above has rough per-country estimates from Unicode CLDR.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where West Central Oromo sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies West Central Oromo as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Afro-Asiatic
  2. Cushitic
  3. East Cushitic
  4. Lowland East Cushitic
  5. Southern Lowland East Cushitic
  6. Mainstream Lowland East Cushitic
  7. Oromoid
  8. Nuclear Oromo
  9. West Central Oromo

More about West Central Oromo

Codes: ISO 639-3 gaz, Glottolog west2721. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about West Central Oromo

Where is West Central Oromo spoken?

West Central Oromo is spoken in Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Sudan. Unicode CLDR puts it at 32% of the population of Ethiopia, which is about 37,936,000 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

Which language family is West Central Oromo in?

Glottolog places West Central Oromo in the Afro-Asiatic family, in the branch Cushitic, East Cushitic, Lowland East Cushitic, Southern Lowland East Cushitic, Mainstream Lowland East Cushitic, Oromoid and Nuclear Oromo.

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