World Language Map

Where is Chavacano spoken?

Chavacano is an Indo-European language, spoken in the Philippines. 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 Chavacano is spoken

Chavacano is spoken in one country: the Philippines.

Country
Philippines

On the map, Chavacano is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), 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 Chavacano.

How many people speak Chavacano?

Wikidata gives about 431,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 2005). 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 Chavacano sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Indo-European
  2. Classical Indo-European
  3. Italic
  4. Latino-Faliscan
  5. Latinic
  6. Imperial Latin
  7. Romance
  8. Italo-Western Romance
  9. Western Romance
  10. Shifted Western Romance
  11. Southwestern Shifted Romance
  12. West Ibero-Romance
  13. Castilic
  14. South Castilic
  15. Ternate-Zamboanga-Cavite
  16. Chavacano

More about Chavacano

Codes: ISO 639-3 cbk, Glottolog chav1241. Glottolog macroarea: Papunesia.

Chavacano is a Romance language, descended from Latin. Latin’s footprint: the Roman Empire at its height → Latin spread along Roman roads →

Questions about Chavacano

Where is Chavacano spoken?

Chavacano is spoken in the Philippines. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Chavacano?

Wikidata gives about 431,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 2005). 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 Chavacano in?

Glottolog places Chavacano in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Italic, Latino-Faliscan, Latinic, Imperial Latin, Romance, Italo-Western Romance, Western Romance, Shifted Western Romance, Southwestern Shifted Romance, West Ibero-Romance, Castilic, South Castilic and Ternate-Zamboanga-Cavite.

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