An Indigenous language is a language native to a region and spoken by its Indigenous peoples. Being Indigenous is separate from being official or endangered: some Indigenous languages are widely used, and some are close to disappearing.
Key takeaways
- An Indigenous language is one native to a region and spoken by that region's Indigenous peoples.
- Indigenous status is separate from official status: Aymara, for example, is both Indigenous and official in Bolivia.
- Navajo is rated not endangered by Glottolog with about 169,000 speakers (census.gov, 2011), while Hawaiian is rated moribund.
- The map has no field that marks a language as Indigenous, so it cannot be filtered that way.
How the term works
An Indigenous language is a language that is native to a region and spoken by its Indigenous peoples. It is sometimes called an autochthonous language [1]. The idea is about origin and belonging, not about numbers or legal status.
That makes it a different question from whether a language is official. Indigenous languages are not necessarily national languages, though they can be, and national languages are not necessarily Indigenous to their country [1]. Aymara is given as an example of a language that is both Indigenous and official in Bolivia [1].
Who counts as Indigenous is not settled by a single formal test, and the words themselves can be sensitive. The Rama people, for example, have proposed "treasure language" as an alternative, because older labels sound pejorative in their local context [1]. Communities sometimes prefer their own terms, so it is best to use the name a community uses for itself.
Indigenous languages are also not all in the same position. A language is considered healthy when it gains new speakers, and it becomes endangered when children stop learning it [1]. Some are doing well, some are being actively revived (see language revitalisation), and some have few speakers left.
An example from our data
Three languages with Indigenous homelands show the range. Navajo belongs to the Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit family, is spoken in United States, and is rated not endangered by Glottolog, with about 169,000 speakers (census.gov, 2011), a figure that is approximate. Maori in New Zealand is rated shifting, with about 214,000 speakers (stats.govt.nz, 2023). Hawaiian is rated moribund, with about 26,000 speakers (2010 United States Census, 2010).
These differences are why Indigenous cannot be read as a synonym for endangered. Each area on the map comes from a published atlas, here mostly Asher and Moseley 2007, and shows where the language has traditionally been spoken. Country pages, such as the list of countries, show which languages are spoken where.
The thing people get wrong
The word is often used as if it meant "small" or "rural". It does not. Indigenous is about a language's connection to a place and its original peoples, and an Indigenous language can be official, widely taught and used in cities [1].
The map does not label languages as Indigenous, minority or regional, because those labels depend on country, law and context, and Glottolog's data does not record them. A language that is Indigenous in one country may be a minority language in another, or may be a foreign language elsewhere.
Frequently asked questions
Are all Indigenous languages endangered?
No. A language is healthy when it gains new speakers, and some Indigenous languages do. On this map, for example, Navajo is rated not endangered by Glottolog.
Is an Indigenous language the same as a minority language?
Not necessarily. Indigenous describes a language's origin in a place, while minority describes how many people speak it compared with others in a territory.
Sources
- Indigenous language, Wikipedia.
- Glottolog, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
- Every figure from our own map is worked out from the datasets on the data sources page (checked against Glottolog and Glottography, retrieved 13 October 2026).