World Language Map

Where is Waata spoken?

Waata is an Afro-Asiatic language, spoken in Kenya and Tanzania. 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 Waata is spoken

Waata is spoken in 2 countries: Kenya and Tanzania.

Country
Kenya
Tanzania

On the map, Waata 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 Waata.

How many people speak Waata?

Wikidata gives about 13,000 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given, 2009). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Threatened. Glottolog lists it as threatened: it is still spoken by all generations, but there are signs that the number of speakers is falling.

Where Waata sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Afro-Asiatic
  2. Cushitic
  3. East Cushitic
  4. Lowland East Cushitic
  5. Southern Lowland East Cushitic
  6. Mainstream Lowland East Cushitic
  7. Oromoid
  8. Nuclear Oromo
  9. Central-Eastern Oromo
  10. Central-Tana Oromo
  11. Tana River Oromo
  12. Waata

Related languages

Other languages in the Tana River Oromo group:

More about Waata

Codes: ISO 639-3 ssn, Glottolog waat1238. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Waata

Where is Waata spoken?

Waata is spoken in Kenya and Tanzania. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Waata?

Wikidata gives about 13,000 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given, 2009). 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 Waata in?

Glottolog places Waata in the Afro-Asiatic family, in the branch Cushitic, East Cushitic, Lowland East Cushitic, Southern Lowland East Cushitic, Mainstream Lowland East Cushitic, Oromoid, Nuclear Oromo, Central-Eastern Oromo, Central-Tana Oromo and Tana River Oromo.

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