World Language Map

Where is Kalanga spoken?

Kalanga is an Atlantic-Congo language, spoken in Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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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 Kalanga is spoken

Kalanga is spoken in 3 countries: Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa. 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
Zimbabwe5.3%908,971
BotswanaNot givenNot given
South AfricaNot 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, Kalanga 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 Kalanga.

How many people speak Kalanga?

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 Kalanga sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Kalanga 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. Shona (S.10)
  10. Kalanga-Nambya
  11. Kalanga

Related languages

Other languages in the Kalanga-Nambya group:

More about Kalanga

Codes: ISO 639-3 kck, Glottolog kala1384. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Kalanga

Where is Kalanga spoken?

Kalanga is spoken in Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa. Unicode CLDR puts it at 5.3% of the population of Zimbabwe, which is about 908,971 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

Which language family is Kalanga in?

Glottolog places Kalanga in the Atlantic-Congo family, in the branch Volta-Congo, Benue-Congo, Bantoid, Southern Bantoid, Narrow Bantu, East Bantu, Southern Bantu, Shona (S.10) and Kalanga-Nambya.

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