World Language Map

Where is Corsican spoken?

Corsican (corsu) is an Indo-European language, spoken in France and Italy. 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 Corsican is spoken

Corsican is spoken in 2 countries: France and Italy. 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
France0.2%164,099
ItalyNot 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.

Corsican 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 Corsican?

Wikidata gives about 151,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 2013). 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 Corsican sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Corsican 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. Italo-Dalmatian
  10. Italian Romance
  11. Central Italian Romance
  12. Corsic
  13. Corsican

Related languages

Other languages in the Corsic group:

More about Corsican

Codes: ISO 639-3 cos, Glottolog cors1241. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

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

Questions about Corsican

Where is Corsican spoken?

Corsican is spoken in France and Italy. Unicode CLDR puts it at 0.2% of the population of France, which is about 164,099 people. On the map it is shown as a single point, because no open area map covers it.

How many people speak Corsican?

Wikidata gives about 151,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 2013). 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 Corsican in?

Glottolog places Corsican in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Italic, Latino-Faliscan, Latinic, Imperial Latin, Romance, Italo-Western Romance, Italo-Dalmatian, Italian Romance, Central Italian Romance and Corsic.

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