World Language Map

Where is Southern Kisi spoken?

Southern Kisi is an Atlantic-Congo language, spoken in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. 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 Southern Kisi is spoken

Southern Kisi is spoken in 3 countries: Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. 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
Liberia4.3%233,802
GuineaNot givenNot given
Sierra LeoneNot 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, Southern Kisi 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 Southern Kisi.

How many people speak Southern Kisi?

Wikidata holds no speaker count for this language. The table above has rough per-country estimates from Unicode CLDR.

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

Where Southern Kisi sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Atlantic-Congo
  2. Mel
  3. Southern Mel
  4. Kissi
  5. Southern Kisi

Related languages

Other languages in the Kissi group:

More about Southern Kisi

Codes: ISO 639-3 kss, Glottolog sout2778. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Southern Kisi

Where is Southern Kisi spoken?

Southern Kisi is spoken in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. Unicode CLDR puts it at 4.3% of the population of Liberia, which is about 233,802 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

Which language family is Southern Kisi in?

Glottolog places Southern Kisi in the Atlantic-Congo family, in the branch Mel, Southern Mel and Kissi.

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