Gabon: linguistic neighbours
Shares an official language with 41 countries; closest tie Cameroon.
Data as of 1 Nov 2026 · 195 partner countries · CLDR 49, Glottolog 5.3, States sheet · USITC DICL v2
Who shares a language with Gabon
Shared-language index of every country with Gabon; the legend is the key.
Small territories are not drawn at this scale.
Nearest
The countries whose people can talk most easily with Gabon's.
How this is measured
Shared language is the common spoken language index from the USITC DICL: the sum over languages of the share of people in Gabon who speak it times the share in the other country, native or acquired. It is not a probability and can exceed 1, because the shares overlap. Proximity measures how close different native languages sit on the language tree, so it is low for same-language pairs and highest for related-but-different languages. Countries under 1 million residents are left out of both boards.
Farthest
The countries with the least language in common with Gabon.
How this is measured
Shared language is the common spoken language index from the USITC DICL: the sum over languages of the share of people in Gabon who speak it times the share in the other country, native or acquired. It is not a probability and can exceed 1, because the shares overlap. Proximity measures how close different native languages sit on the language tree, so it is low for same-language pairs and highest for related-but-different languages. Countries under 1 million residents are left out of both boards.
Where these numbers come from
Pair figures come from the USITC Dynamic International Country Linguistics database, version 2 (CC BY 4.0). See Method.
- Unicode CLDR territoryInfo (release 49) (Unicode License v3). Country-level language shares, official status and Tier 3 reach (populationPercent is total speakers, first plus second language).
- Glottolog 5.3 (CC BY 4.0). Language names, ISO 639-3 codes, families.
- Database of International and Intranational Linguistic distances (DICL v2), USITC (CC BY 4.0). Country-pair common spoken language and linguistic proximity (neighbours, linked-world score, pairs pages).
- States (ISO 3166-2) sheet, MetroAreas workbook (Citizen of Nowhere, own compilation). States, populations and the four language labels per state.
- Natural Earth 1:110m Admin 0 Countries (nvkelso/natural-earth-vector) (Public domain). World outline for the language maps (world-110m.geojson, properties reduced to iso3 and name).
- Country layer of this site (countries.json workbook population, World Bank iso2 and iso3, OWID country-population) (Citizen of Nowhere, own compilation; World Bank CC BY 4.0; OWID CC BY). Country population, iso2 and /countries slug joined onto languages, countries and families (speakers = share x population).