Where Northern Ju is spoken
Northern Ju is spoken in 2 countries: Angola and Namibia.
On the map, Northern Ju 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 Northern Ju.
How many people speak Northern Ju?
Wikidata gives about 5,600 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 Northern Ju sits in the language family tree
Glottolog classifies Northern Ju as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.
- Kxa
- Ju-Kung
- Northern Ju
Related languages
Other languages in the Ju-Kung group:
- South-Eastern Ju (34,000 speakers)
- Central Ju
- North-Central Ju
More about Northern Ju
Codes: ISO 639-3 vaj, Glottolog vase1234. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.
Questions about Northern Ju
Where is Northern Ju spoken?
Northern Ju is spoken in Angola and Namibia. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.
How many people speak Northern Ju?
Wikidata gives about 5,600 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 Northern Ju in?
Glottolog places Northern Ju in the Kxa family, in the branch Ju-Kung.