The Major Languages of Tanzania
Tanzania is a fascinating country, famous for Kilimanjaro, the Serengeti and the waters around Zanzibar. Tanzania is also the heart of the Swahili language and Swahili media such as Swahiliwood. There are however many other languages in the country, and I wanted to find out more about the most widely spoken ones.
If you believe I got any of the borders wrong, or if there are more languages that should be included (for example for number of speakers, or mutual intelligibility etc.) please tell me! Or any other mistakes, comments etc.
HD map: https://i.redd.it/xy519sy09r831.jpg
Footnotes:
-I only included languages with a native speakerbase over one million.
-There must be at least one million of the speakers in Tanzania, that means that the Luo and Maasai are for example not included because their speakers mostly reside in Kenya.
-I did not write the exact number nor estimates of the speakerbase for each language since the estimates vary wildly depending on source. Even the population of Tanzania is not certain since the last national census was conducted in 2012, and the estimates are known to miss by a few millions. Censuses regarding languages are sparse and far in between. A lot of guesswork going on here.
-I found sources saying Hehe and Bena are mutually intelligible, others saying they are not. I found sources saying Hangaza and Ha are mutually intelligible with Kinyarwanda/Kirundi, others saying they are not. My decisions in both cases might be wrong, and I would be happy to be corrected.
-I colored in Burundi and Rwanda to show their relation to Ha and Hangaza.
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