World Language Map

Where is Kikuyu spoken?

Kikuyu (Gĩkũyũ) is an Atlantic-Congo language, spoken in Kenya. 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 Kikuyu is spoken

Kikuyu is spoken in one country: Kenya. 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
Kenya17%9,901,888

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, Kikuyu 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 Kikuyu.

How many people speak Kikuyu?

Wikidata gives about 6.6 million speakers (Ethnologue). 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 Kikuyu sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Kikuyu 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. Northeast Savanna Bantu
  9. Central Kenya Bantu
  10. Gikuyu-Temi
  11. Kikuyu

Related languages

Other languages in the Gikuyu-Temi group:

More about Kikuyu

Codes: ISO 639-3 kik, Glottolog kiku1240. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Kikuyu

Where is Kikuyu spoken?

Kikuyu is spoken in Kenya. Unicode CLDR puts it at 17% of the population of Kenya, which is about 9,901,888 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Kikuyu?

Wikidata gives about 6.6 million speakers (Ethnologue). 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 Kikuyu in?

Glottolog places Kikuyu in the Atlantic-Congo family, in the branch Volta-Congo, Benue-Congo, Bantoid, Southern Bantoid, Narrow Bantu, East Bantu, Northeast Savanna Bantu, Central Kenya Bantu and Gikuyu-Temi.

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.