World Language Map

Where is Haitian spoken?

Haitian (Kreyòl ayisyen) is an Indo-European language, spoken in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The outlined area on the map shows where.

Tap or scroll to load the interactive map

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 Haitian is spoken

Haitian is spoken in 2 countries: Haiti and the Dominican Republic. 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
Haiti81%9,520,659
Dominican RepublicNot 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, Haitian 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 Haitian.

How many people speak Haitian?

Wikidata gives about 9.6 million first-language speakers (Nationalencyklopedin, 2007). 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 Haitian sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Haitian 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. Northwestern Shifted Romance
  12. Gallo-Rhaetian
  13. Oil
  14. Central Oil
  15. Macro-French
  16. Circum-Caribbean French
  17. Haitian

Related languages

Other languages in the Circum-Caribbean French group:

More about Haitian

Codes: ISO 639-3 hat, Glottolog hait1244. Glottolog macroarea: North America.

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

Questions about Haitian

Where is Haitian spoken?

Haitian is spoken in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Unicode CLDR puts it at 81% of the population of Haiti, which is about 9,520,659 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Haitian?

Wikidata gives about 9.6 million first-language speakers (Nationalencyklopedin, 2007). 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 Haitian in?

Glottolog places Haitian 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, Northwestern Shifted Romance, Gallo-Rhaetian, Oil, Central Oil, Macro-French and Circum-Caribbean French.

Embed this map

Copy this code into your web page. It is free to use. Please keep the link under the map, as it is how people find where the map comes from.