World Language Map

Where is Yoruba spoken?

Yoruba (Èdè Yorùbá) is an Atlantic-Congo language, spoken in Nigeria and Benin. 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 Yoruba is spoken

Yoruba is spoken in 2 countries: Nigeria and Benin. 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
Nigeria13%30,777,110
Benin6.7%984,706

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, Yoruba 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 Yoruba.

How many people speak Yoruba?

Wikidata gives about 37.8 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). 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 Yoruba sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Atlantic-Congo
  2. Volta-Congo
  3. Benue-Congo
  4. Defoid
  5. Yoruboid
  6. Edekiri
  7. Ede
  8. Eastern Ede
  9. Southeastern Ede
  10. Nuclear Yoruba
  11. Lucumi-Yoruba
  12. Yoruba

More about Yoruba

Codes: ISO 639-3 yor, Glottolog yoru1245. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Yoruba

Where is Yoruba spoken?

Yoruba is spoken in Nigeria and Benin. Unicode CLDR puts it at 13% of the population of Nigeria, which is about 30,777,110 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Yoruba?

Wikidata gives about 37.8 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). 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 Yoruba in?

Glottolog places Yoruba in the Atlantic-Congo family, in the branch Volta-Congo, Benue-Congo, Defoid, Yoruboid, Edekiri, Ede, Eastern Ede, Southeastern Ede, Nuclear Yoruba and Lucumi-Yoruba.

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