World Language Map

Where is Chuukese spoken?

Chuukese (fóósun Chuuk) is an Austronesian language, spoken in Micronesia. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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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 Chuukese is spoken

Chuukese is spoken in one country: Micronesia. 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
Micronesia30%29,881

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.

On the map, Chuukese 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 Chuukese.

How many people speak Chuukese?

Wikidata gives about 51,000 first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2000). 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 Chuukese sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Austronesian
  2. Malayo-Polynesian
  3. Eastern Malayo-Polynesian
  4. Oceanic
  5. Micronesian
  6. Central Micronesian
  7. Western Micronesian
  8. Chuukic-Ponapeic
  9. Trukic
  10. Nuclear Trukic
  11. Central Trukic
  12. Eastern Trukic
  13. Mortlockese-Trukese
  14. Chuukese

Related languages

Other languages in the Mortlockese-Trukese group:

More about Chuukese

Codes: ISO 639-3 chk, Glottolog chuu1238. Glottolog macroarea: Papunesia.

Questions about Chuukese

Where is Chuukese spoken?

Chuukese is spoken in Micronesia. Unicode CLDR puts it at 30% of the population of Micronesia, which is about 29,881 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Chuukese?

Wikidata gives about 51,000 first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2000). 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 Chuukese in?

Glottolog places Chuukese in the Austronesian family, in the branch Malayo-Polynesian, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Oceanic, Micronesian, Central Micronesian, Western Micronesian, Chuukic-Ponapeic, Trukic, Nuclear Trukic, Central Trukic, Eastern Trukic and Mortlockese-Trukese.

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