Where is Susu spoken?

Susu (Sosoxui) is a Mande language, spoken in Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal 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 Susu is spoken

Susu is spoken in 4 countries: Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal 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
Guinea11%1,538,482
Guinea-BissauNot givenNot given
SenegalNot 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, Susu 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 Susu.

How many people speak Susu?

Wikidata gives about 2.4 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 26th Edition, 2019). 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 Susu sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Mande
  2. Western Mande
  3. Manding-Kpelle
  4. Central Mande
  5. Susu-Yalunka
  6. Susu

Related languages

Other languages in the Susu-Yalunka group:

More about Susu

Codes: ISO 639-3 sus, Glottolog susu1250. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Susu

Where is Susu spoken?

Susu is spoken in Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal and Sierra Leone. Unicode CLDR puts it at 11% of the population of Guinea, which is about 1,538,482 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Susu?

Wikidata gives about 2.4 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 26th Edition, 2019). 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 Susu in?

Glottolog places Susu in the Mande family, in the branch Western Mande, Manding-Kpelle, Central Mande and Susu-Yalunka.

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