Where is Kashubian spoken?

Kashubian (Kaszëbskô mòwa) is an Indo-European language, spoken in Poland. 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 Kashubian is spoken

Kashubian is spoken in one country: Poland. 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
Poland0.1%50,370

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.

Kashubian 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 Kashubian?

Wikidata gives about 108,000 speakers (Polish census of 2011, 2011). 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 Kashubian sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Indo-European
  2. Classical Indo-European
  3. Balto-Slavic
  4. Slavic
  5. West Slavic
  6. Lechitic
  7. Kashubian

More about Kashubian

Codes: ISO 639-3 csb, Glottolog kash1274. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Kashubian

Where is Kashubian spoken?

Kashubian is spoken in Poland. Unicode CLDR puts it at 0.1% of the population of Poland, which is about 50,370 people. On the map it is shown as a single point, because no open area map covers it.

How many people speak Kashubian?

Wikidata gives about 108,000 speakers (Polish census of 2011, 2011). 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 Kashubian in?

Glottolog places Kashubian in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Balto-Slavic, Slavic, West Slavic and Lechitic.

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