World Language Map

Where is Tsum spoken?

Tsum is a Sino-Tibetan language, spoken in China and Nepal. 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 Tsum is spoken

Tsum is spoken in 2 countries: China and Nepal.

Country
China
Nepal

On the map, Tsum 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 Tsum.

How many people speak Tsum?

Wikidata holds no speaker count for this language.

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

Where Tsum sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Sino-Tibetan
  2. Bodic
  3. Bodish
  4. Early Old Tibetan
  5. Middle Old Tibetan
  6. Late Old Tibetan
  7. Central Tibetan
  8. South-Western Tibetic
  9. Kyirong-Kagate
  10. Tsum

More about Tsum

Codes: ISO 639-3 ttz, Glottolog tsum1240. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Tsum

Where is Tsum spoken?

Tsum is spoken in China and Nepal. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

Which language family is Tsum in?

Glottolog places Tsum in the Sino-Tibetan family, in the branch Bodic, Bodish, Early Old Tibetan, Middle Old Tibetan, Late Old Tibetan, Central Tibetan, South-Western Tibetic and Kyirong-Kagate.

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