World Language Map

Where is Karaim spoken?

Karaim is a Turkic language, spoken in Lithuania and Ukraine. It is marked on the map by a ringed point.

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  • 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 Karaim is spoken

Karaim is spoken in 2 countries: Lithuania and Ukraine.

Country
Lithuania
Ukraine

Karaim 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 Karaim?

Wikidata gives about 80 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given, 2014). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Nearly extinct. Glottolog lists it as nearly extinct: only a few elderly speakers are left.

Where Karaim sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Turkic
  2. Common Turkic
  3. Kipchak-Turkestan
  4. Kipchak
  5. Northwest Kipchak
  6. West Kipchak
  7. Karaim

More about Karaim

Codes: ISO 639-3 kdr, Glottolog kara1464. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Karaim

Where is Karaim spoken?

Karaim is spoken in Lithuania and Ukraine. On the map it is shown as a single point, because no open area map covers it.

How many people speak Karaim?

Wikidata gives about 80 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given, 2014). 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 Karaim in?

Glottolog places Karaim in the Turkic family, in the branch Common Turkic, Kipchak-Turkestan, Kipchak, Northwest Kipchak and West Kipchak.

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