World Language Map

Where is Bandi spoken?

Bandi is a Mande language, spoken in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. 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 Bandi is spoken

Bandi is spoken in 3 countries: Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. 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
Liberia2.9%157,680
GuineaNot givenNot given
Sierra LeoneNot 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, Bandi 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 Bandi.

How many people speak Bandi?

Wikidata holds no speaker count for this language. The table above has rough per-country estimates from Unicode CLDR.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where Bandi sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Mande
  2. Western Mande
  3. Manding-Kpelle
  4. Southwest Mande
  5. Mende-Loma
  6. Mende-Bandi
  7. Bandi-Zialo
  8. Bandi

Related languages

Other languages in the Bandi-Zialo group:

More about Bandi

Codes: ISO 639-3 bza, Glottolog band1352. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Bandi

Where is Bandi spoken?

Bandi is spoken in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. Unicode CLDR puts it at 2.9% of the population of Liberia, which is about 157,680 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

Which language family is Bandi in?

Glottolog places Bandi in the Mande family, in the branch Western Mande, Manding-Kpelle, Southwest Mande, Mende-Loma, Mende-Bandi and Bandi-Zialo.

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