World Language Map

Where is Zulu spoken?

Zulu (isiZulu) is an Atlantic-Congo language, spoken in South Africa, Lesotho, Eswatini, Malawi and 2 more. The outlined area on the map shows where.

Tap or scroll to load the interactive map

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 Zulu is spoken

Zulu is spoken in 6 countries: South Africa, Lesotho, Eswatini, Malawi and 2 more. 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
South Africa24%14,506,224
Lesotho14%311,857
Eswatini6.8%77,390
Malawi0.3%71,819
BotswanaNot givenNot given
MozambiqueNot 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, Zulu 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 Zulu.

How many people speak Zulu?

Wikidata gives about 12.1 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). It also lists about 15.7 million second-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2011). 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 Zulu sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Zulu 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. East Bantu
  8. Southern Bantu
  9. Nuclear Southern Bantu
  10. Dimsuffix Southern Bantu
  11. Nguni-Tsonga-Copi
  12. Nguni (S.40)
  13. Nuclear Nguni
  14. Southern Ndebele-Lowland
  15. Zulu

Related languages

Other languages in the Southern Ndebele-Lowland group:

  • Xhosa (8.2 million speakers)

More about Zulu

Codes: ISO 639-3 zul, Glottolog zulu1248. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Zulu

Where is Zulu spoken?

Zulu is spoken in South Africa, Lesotho, Eswatini, Malawi and 2 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 24% of the population of South Africa, which is about 14,506,224 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Zulu?

Wikidata gives about 12.1 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. It also lists about 15.7 million second-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2011).

Which language family is Zulu in?

Glottolog places Zulu in the Atlantic-Congo family, in the branch Volta-Congo, Benue-Congo, Bantoid, Southern Bantoid, Narrow Bantu, East Bantu, Southern Bantu, Nuclear Southern Bantu, Dimsuffix Southern Bantu, Nguni-Tsonga-Copi, Nguni (S.40), Nuclear Nguni and Southern Ndebele-Lowland.

Embed this map

Copy this code into your web page. It is free to use. Please keep the link under the map, as it is how people find where the map comes from.