Maps of Western delta

North Africa: Semitic in Northern Africa


Semitic in Northern Africa

Data Source:   Irvine, A. K. and David Appleyard. 2007. "The Middle East and North Africa". In R. E. Asher & Christopher Moseley (eds.). Atlas of the World’s Languages. Oxford: Routledge.

"Afro-Asiatic: Composite 2010". MultiTree: A Digital Library of Language Relationships

Date Digitized:   May 2011.

Map Description:
The areas pictured display locations of where Semitic languages are spoken in northern Africa today. According to Irvine and Appleyard (2007), "it is estimated that over 200 million people speak one or another of the many and varied forms of dialect Arabic," which accounts for a large percentage of the featured section of the continent inhabited by Semitic speakers. Because of the immense variation within dialect areas, some sections of this map have been labeled to indicate that there is a group of language variations in a continuum, sharing a particular shaded area (Irvine and Appleyard 2007).

This original map was made by vectorizing data from the MultiTree language database and the Atlas of the World's Languages.


Other resources related to this project:
This folder (Northern African Languages) contains other maps showing linguistic subgroups. The maps may be overlaid on each other for a more complete picture.


Note: Scanned or downloaded images have been geo-registered for compatibility with our project interface. Slight imperfections are an inevitable result of the registration process.