World Language Map

Where is Shilluk spoken?

Shilluk is a Nilotic language, spoken in Ethiopia, South Sudan and Sudan. 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

  • 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 Shilluk is spoken

Shilluk is spoken in 3 countries: Ethiopia, South Sudan and Sudan.

Country
Ethiopia
South Sudan
Sudan

On the map, Shilluk 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 Shilluk.

How many people speak Shilluk?

Wikidata gives about 2 million speakers (Wikidata, with no source given). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

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

Where Shilluk sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Nilotic
  2. Western Nilotic
  3. Lwoo
  4. Northern Lwoo
  5. Shilluk

Related languages

Other languages in the Northern Lwoo group:

More about Shilluk

Codes: ISO 639-3 shk, Glottolog shil1265. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Shilluk

Where is Shilluk spoken?

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

How many people speak Shilluk?

Wikidata gives about 2 million 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 Shilluk in?

Glottolog places Shilluk in the Nilotic family, in the branch Western Nilotic, Lwoo and Northern Lwoo.

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