World Language Map

Where is Tala spoken?

Tala is an Afro-Asiatic language, spoken in Nigeria. 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 Tala is spoken

Tala is spoken in one country: Nigeria.

Country
Nigeria

On the map, Tala 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 Tala.

How many people speak Tala?

Wikidata gives about 1,000 first-language speakers (ethnologue.com, 1993). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Shifting. Glottolog lists it as shifting: the youngest speakers are adults, and children are growing up speaking another language.

Where Tala sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Afro-Asiatic
  2. Chadic
  3. West Chadic
  4. West Chadic B
  5. West Chadic B.3
  6. South Bauchi East
  7. Guruntumic
  8. Tala-Sho-Zangwal
  9. Tala-Zamwar
  10. Tala

Related languages

Other languages in the Tala-Zamwar group:

More about Tala

Codes: ISO 639-3 tak, Glottolog tala1295. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Tala

Where is Tala spoken?

Tala is spoken in Nigeria. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Tala?

Wikidata gives about 1,000 first-language speakers (ethnologue.com, 1993). 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 Tala in?

Glottolog places Tala in the Afro-Asiatic family, in the branch Chadic, West Chadic, West Chadic B, West Chadic B.3, South Bauchi East, Guruntumic, Tala-Sho-Zangwal and Tala-Zamwar.

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