World Language Map

Where is Ayoreo spoken?

Ayoreo is a Zamucoan language, spoken in Bolivia and Paraguay. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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The filter only changes what is drawn. Tap the map to list every language at a spot, whichever family is shown. You can also pick any family from its own page.

Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Ayoreo is spoken

Ayoreo is spoken in 2 countries: Bolivia and Paraguay.

Country
Bolivia
Paraguay

On the map, Ayoreo is drawn as an area from Messineo 2011 (Gran Chaco). The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18643516), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Ayoreo.

How many people speak Ayoreo?

Wikidata gives about 2,189 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given, 2012). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Shifting. Glottolog lists it as shifting: the youngest speakers are adults, and children are growing up speaking another language.

Where Ayoreo sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Ayoreo as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Zamucoan
  2. Zamuco-Ayoreo
  3. Ayoreo

More about Ayoreo

Codes: ISO 639-3 ayo, Glottolog ayor1240. Glottolog macroarea: South America.

Questions about Ayoreo

Where is Ayoreo spoken?

Ayoreo is spoken in Bolivia and Paraguay. On the map it is shown as an area from Messineo 2011 (Gran Chaco).

How many people speak Ayoreo?

Wikidata gives about 2,189 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given, 2012). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Which language family is Ayoreo in?

Glottolog places Ayoreo in the Zamucoan family, in the branch Zamuco-Ayoreo.

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