World Language Map

Where is Zenaga spoken?

Zenaga is an Afro-Asiatic language, spoken in Mauritania, Senegal and Western Sahara. 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 Zenaga is spoken

Zenaga is spoken in 3 countries: Mauritania, Senegal and Western Sahara.

Country
Mauritania
Senegal
Western Sahara

On the map, Zenaga 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 Zenaga.

How many people speak Zenaga?

Wikidata gives about 200 speakers (ethnologue.com, 2018). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Moribund. Glottolog lists it as moribund: the youngest speakers are middle-aged or older, and children are no longer learning it.

Where Zenaga sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Afro-Asiatic
  2. Berber
  3. Western Berber
  4. Zenaga

Related languages

Other languages in the Western Berber group:

More about Zenaga

Codes: ISO 639-3 zen, Glottolog zena1248. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Zenaga

Where is Zenaga spoken?

Zenaga is spoken in Mauritania, Senegal and Western Sahara. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Zenaga?

Wikidata gives about 200 speakers (ethnologue.com, 2018). 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 Zenaga in?

Glottolog places Zenaga in the Afro-Asiatic family, in the branch Berber and Western Berber.

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