Maps of Ghomara

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.

The UNESCO Database of Endangered Languages (UNESCO)

The UNESCO Database of Endangered Languages

Map Creator:   LINGUIST List (Anthony Aristar)
Data Source:   Mosely Christopher. 2010. Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, 3rd edn. Paris, UNESCO Publishing, Online version. http://www.unesco.org/culture/languages-atlas/ (29 November 2010)
Contact:   llmaplinguistlist.org
Usage Notes/Copyright Status:   Used by Permission
Date Created:   29 November 2010

Map Description:
UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger is a database intended to raise awareness about language endangerment and the need to safeguard the world’s linguistic diversity among policy-makers, speaker communities and the general public, and to be a tool to monitor the status of endangered languages and the trends in linguistic diversity at the global level.

Degrees of endangerment
The map designates the degrees of endangerment as based on UNESCO’s Language Vitality and Endangerment framework.

This establishes six degrees of vitality/endangerment based on nine factors. Of these factors, the most salient is that of intergenerational transmission.

Degree of endangerment Intergenerational Language Transmission
safe language is spoken by all generations; intergenerational transmission is uninterrupted
>> not included in the map
vulnerable most children speak the language, but it may be restricted to certain domains (e.g., home)
definitely endangered children no longer learn the language as mother tongue in the home
severely endangered language is spoken by grandparents and older generations; while the parent generation may understand it, they do not speak it to children or among themselves
critically endangered the youngest speakers are grandparents and older, and they speak the language partially and infrequently
extinct there are no speakers left
>> included in the Atlas if presumably extinct since the 1950s




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.