Skip to content

Where is Zay spoken?

Zay is an Afro-Asiatic language, spoken in Ethiopia. It is marked on the map by a ringed point.

Tap or scroll to load the interactive map

Search for a language or a town

Show language family

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 Zay is spoken

Zay is spoken in one country: Ethiopia.

Country
Ethiopia

Zay has no area on the map because no open area map covers it. The ringed point is the position Glottolog gives for the language.

How many people speak Zay?

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 Zay sits in the language family tree

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

Afro-Asiatic
Semitic
West Semitic
Ethiosemitic
South Ethiopic
Harari-East Gurage
Zay

Related languages

Other languages in the Harari-East Gurage group:

Harari (26,000 speakers)

More about Zay

Codes: ISO 639-3 zwa, Glottolog zayy1238. Glottolog macroarea: Africa.

Questions about Zay

Where is Zay spoken?

Zay is spoken in Ethiopia. On the map it is shown as a single point, because no open area map covers it.

Which language family is Zay in?

Glottolog places Zay in the Afro-Asiatic family, in the branch Semitic, West Semitic, Ethiosemitic, South Ethiopic and Harari-East Gurage.