World Language Map

Where is Orma spoken?

Orma is an Afro-Asiatic language, spoken in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. 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 Orma is spoken

Orma is spoken in 3 countries: Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia.

Country
Ethiopia
Kenya
Somalia

On the map, Orma 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 Orma.

How many people speak Orma?

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 Orma sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Afro-Asiatic
  2. Cushitic
  3. East Cushitic
  4. Lowland East Cushitic
  5. Southern Lowland East Cushitic
  6. Mainstream Lowland East Cushitic
  7. Oromoid
  8. Nuclear Oromo
  9. Central-Eastern Oromo
  10. Central-Tana Oromo
  11. Tana River Oromo
  12. Orma

Related languages

Other languages in the Tana River Oromo group:

More about Orma

Codes: ISO 639-3 orc, Glottolog orma1241. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Orma

Where is Orma spoken?

Orma is spoken in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

Which language family is Orma in?

Glottolog places Orma in the Afro-Asiatic family, in the branch Cushitic, East Cushitic, Lowland East Cushitic, Southern Lowland East Cushitic, Mainstream Lowland East Cushitic, Oromoid, Nuclear Oromo, Central-Eastern Oromo, Central-Tana Oromo and Tana River Oromo.

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