World Language Map

Where is Bavarian spoken?

Bavarian (Boarisch) is an Indo-European language, spoken in Germany, Austria, Czechia, Italy and 3 more. It is marked on the map by a ringed point.

Tap or scroll to load the interactive map

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 Bavarian is spoken

Bavarian is spoken in 7 countries: Germany, Austria, Czechia, Italy and 3 more. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Germany17%14,300,247
Austria95%8,519,581
CzechiaNot givenNot given
ItalyNot givenNot given
RomaniaNot givenNot given
SloveniaNot givenNot given
SwitzerlandNot givenNot given

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

Bavarian has no area on the map because no open area map covers it. The ringed point is the position Glottolog gives for the language.

How many people speak Bavarian?

Wikidata gives about 14.1 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Threatened. Glottolog lists it as threatened: it is still spoken by all generations, but there are signs that the number of speakers is falling.

Where Bavarian sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Indo-European
  2. Classical Indo-European
  3. Germanic
  4. Northwest Germanic
  5. West Germanic
  6. High German
  7. Upper German
  8. Middle-Modern High German
  9. Modern High German
  10. Bairisch
  11. Bavarian

More about Bavarian

Codes: ISO 639-3 bar, Glottolog bava1246. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Bavarian

Where is Bavarian spoken?

Bavarian is spoken in Germany, Austria, Czechia, Italy and 3 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 17% of the population of Germany, which is about 14,300,247 people. On the map it is shown as a single point, because no open area map covers it.

How many people speak Bavarian?

Wikidata gives about 14.1 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). 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 Bavarian in?

Glottolog places Bavarian in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Germanic, Northwest Germanic, West Germanic, High German, Upper German, Middle-Modern High German, Modern High German and Bairisch.

Embed this map

Copy this code into your web page. It is free to use. Please keep the link under the map, as it is how people find where the map comes from.