World Language Map

Where is Lisu spoken?

Lisu (傈僳语) is a Sino-Tibetan language, spoken in China, India, Myanmar and Thailand. 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 Lisu is spoken

Lisu is spoken in 4 countries: China, India, Myanmar and Thailand.

Country
China
India
Myanmar
Thailand

On the map, Lisu 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 Lisu.

How many people speak Lisu?

Wikidata holds no speaker count for this language.

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

Where Lisu sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Sino-Tibetan
  2. Burmo-Qiangic
  3. Lolo-Burmese
  4. Loloish
  5. Ni-Li-Kazhouish
  6. Lisoid
  7. Nuclear Lisoid
  8. Lisu-Laluba-Lavu
  9. Lisu

Related languages

Other languages in the Lisu-Laluba-Lavu group:

More about Lisu

Codes: ISO 639-3 lis, Glottolog lisu1250. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Lisu

Where is Lisu spoken?

Lisu is spoken in China, India, Myanmar and Thailand. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

Which language family is Lisu in?

Glottolog places Lisu in the Sino-Tibetan family, in the branch Burmo-Qiangic, Lolo-Burmese, Loloish, Ni-Li-Kazhouish, Lisoid, Nuclear Lisoid and Lisu-Laluba-Lavu.

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.