Skip to content

Kru languages map

38 Kru languages are on the map, most of them in Ivory Coast and Liberia. It divides into 2 main branches, the largest being Greater Western Kru (26 languages). The best-known members include Bassa. Only this family is drawn; tap the map to list every language at a spot.

Tap or scroll to load the interactive map

Search for a language or a town

Show language family

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.

The Kru family at a glance

38languages
25drawn as areas
13shown as points
2main branches

Colours on the map mark the ten largest families; this page’s filter shows Kru alone. Areas are generalisations from published atlases and overlap with the areas of other families.

Biggest Kru languages

By approximate speaker counts from Wikidata, each with its source and year on its own page.

Where is Bassa spoken? (about 420,000 speakers)

Branches of Kru

The second level of the Glottolog family tree.

Greater Western Kru (26)
Eastern Kru (12)

Where Kru languages are spoken

Countries with the most Kru languages, with the number of languages in brackets.

All 38 Kru languages, A to Z

Questions about Kru languages

How many Kru languages are there?

38 living Kru languages are on this map, in the Glottolog classification. They fall into 2 main branches, the biggest being Greater Western Kru (26 languages). Other classifications group languages differently, so totals vary.

Where are Kru languages spoken?

Ivory Coast (29), Liberia (22) and Sierra Leone (2) have the most Kru languages, with the number of languages in brackets.