World Language Map

Where is Murle spoken?

Murle is a Surmic language, spoken in Ethiopia and South Sudan. 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 Murle is spoken

Murle is spoken in 2 countries: Ethiopia and South Sudan.

Country
Ethiopia
South Sudan

On the map, Murle 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 Murle.

How many people speak Murle?

Wikidata holds no speaker count for this language.

Status: Threatened. Glottolog lists it as threatened: it is still spoken by all generations, but there are signs that the number of speakers is falling.

Where Murle sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Surmic
  2. South Surmic
  3. Southwest Surmic
  4. Didinga-Murle
  5. Murle

Related languages

Other languages in the Didinga-Murle group:

More about Murle

Codes: ISO 639-3 mur, Glottolog murl1244. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Murle

Where is Murle spoken?

Murle is spoken in Ethiopia and South Sudan. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

Which language family is Murle in?

Glottolog places Murle in the Surmic family, in the branch South Surmic, Southwest Surmic and Didinga-Murle.

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