World Language Map

Where is Kaiwá spoken?

Kaiwá is a Tupian language, spoken in Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. 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 Kaiwá is spoken

Kaiwá is spoken in 3 countries: Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay.

Country
Argentina
Brazil
Paraguay

On the map, Kaiwá 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 Kaiwá.

How many people speak Kaiwá?

Wikidata holds no speaker count for this language.

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 Kaiwá sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Tupian
  2. Eastern Tupian
  3. Maweti-Guarani
  4. Aweti-Guarani
  5. Tupi-Guarani
  6. Southern Tupi-Guarani
  7. Tupi-Guarani Subgroup I
  8. Tupi-Guarani Subgroup I.A
  9. Paraguay-Brazil Guarani
  10. Kaiowa
  11. Kaiwá

Related languages

Other languages in the Kaiowa group:

More about Kaiwá

Codes: ISO 639-3 kgk, Glottolog kaiw1246. Glottolog macroarea: South America.

Questions about Kaiwá

Where is Kaiwá spoken?

Kaiwá is spoken in Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

Which language family is Kaiwá in?

Glottolog places Kaiwá in the Tupian family, in the branch Eastern Tupian, Maweti-Guarani, Aweti-Guarani, Tupi-Guarani, Southern Tupi-Guarani, Tupi-Guarani Subgroup I, Tupi-Guarani Subgroup I.A, Paraguay-Brazil Guarani and Kaiowa.

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