World Language Map

Where is Nama (Namibia) spoken?

Nama (Namibia) (Khoekhoegowab) is a Khoe-Kwadi language, spoken in Namibia, Botswana and South Africa. 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

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  • 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 Nama (Namibia) is spoken

Nama (Namibia) is spoken in 3 countries: Namibia, 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
Namibia11%308,403
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, Nama (Namibia) 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 Nama (Namibia).

How many people speak Nama (Namibia)?

Wikidata gives about 250,000 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

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 Nama (Namibia) sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Nama (Namibia) as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Khoe-Kwadi
  2. Khoe
  3. Khoekhoe
  4. North Khoekhoe
  5. Nama (Namibia)

Related languages

Other languages in the North Khoekhoe group:

More about Nama (Namibia)

Codes: ISO 639-3 naq, Glottolog nama1264. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Nama (Namibia)

Where is Nama (Namibia) spoken?

Nama (Namibia) is spoken in Namibia, Botswana and South Africa. Unicode CLDR puts it at 11% of the population of Namibia, which is about 308,403 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Nama (Namibia)?

Wikidata gives about 250,000 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given). 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 Nama (Namibia) in?

Glottolog places Nama (Namibia) in the Khoe-Kwadi family, in the branch Khoe, Khoekhoe and North Khoekhoe.

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