World Language Map

Where is Bwe Karen spoken?

Bwe Karen is a Sino-Tibetan language, spoken in Myanmar and Thailand. It is marked on the map by a ringed point.

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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 Bwe Karen is spoken

Bwe Karen is spoken in 2 countries: Myanmar and Thailand.

Country
Myanmar
Thailand

Bwe Karen 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 Bwe Karen?

Wikidata gives about 17,000 speakers (ethnologue.com, 1997). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where Bwe Karen sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Sino-Tibetan
  2. Karenic
  3. Central Karen
  4. Geba-Bwe
  5. Bwe Karen

Related languages

Other languages in the Geba-Bwe group:

More about Bwe Karen

Codes: ISO 639-3 bwe, Glottolog bwek1238. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Bwe Karen

Where is Bwe Karen spoken?

Bwe Karen is spoken in Myanmar and Thailand. On the map it is shown as a single point, because no open area map covers it.

How many people speak Bwe Karen?

Wikidata gives about 17,000 speakers (ethnologue.com, 1997). 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 Bwe Karen in?

Glottolog places Bwe Karen in the Sino-Tibetan family, in the branch Karenic, Central Karen and Geba-Bwe.

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