World Language Map

Where is Chuvash spoken?

Chuvash (Чăваш чĕлхи) is a Turkic language, spoken in Russia, Estonia and Kazakhstan. 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 Chuvash is spoken

Chuvash is spoken in 3 countries: Russia, Estonia and Kazakhstan. 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
Russia1.3%1,830,673
EstoniaNot givenNot given
KazakhstanNot 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.

On the map, Chuvash 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 Chuvash.

How many people speak Chuvash?

Wikidata gives about 738,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 2024). 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 Chuvash sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Turkic
  2. Bolgar
  3. Chuvash

More about Chuvash

Codes: ISO 639-3 chv, Glottolog chuv1255. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Chuvash

Where is Chuvash spoken?

Chuvash is spoken in Russia, Estonia and Kazakhstan. Unicode CLDR puts it at 1.3% of the population of Russia, which is about 1,830,673 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Chuvash?

Wikidata gives about 738,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 2024). 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 Chuvash in?

Glottolog places Chuvash in the Turkic family, in the branch Bolgar.

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