World Language Map

Where is Zemba spoken?

Zemba is an Atlantic-Congo language, spoken in Angola and Namibia. 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 Zemba is spoken

Zemba is spoken in 2 countries: Angola and Namibia.

Country
Angola
Namibia

On the map, Zemba 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 Zemba.

How many people speak Zemba?

Wikidata gives about 22,000 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given). 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 Zemba sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Zemba 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. Central-Western Bantu
  8. Njila
  9. Southern Njila
  10. Kunene
  11. Cimbebasia
  12. Herero (R.30)
  13. Zemba

Related languages

Other languages in the Herero (R.30) group:

More about Zemba

Codes: ISO 639-3 dhm, Glottolog zemb1238. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Zemba

Where is Zemba spoken?

Zemba is spoken in Angola and Namibia. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Zemba?

Wikidata gives about 22,000 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 Zemba in?

Glottolog places Zemba in the Atlantic-Congo family, in the branch Volta-Congo, Benue-Congo, Bantoid, Southern Bantoid, Narrow Bantu, Central-Western Bantu, Njila, Southern Njila, Kunene, Cimbebasia and Herero (R.30).

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