World Language Map

Where is Kuanua spoken?

Kuanua is an Austronesian language, spoken in Papua New Guinea. 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 Kuanua is spoken

Kuanua is spoken in one country: Papua New Guinea.

Country
Papua New Guinea

On the map, Kuanua 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 Kuanua.

How many people speak Kuanua?

Wikidata gives about 61,000 first-language speakers (Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 18th Edition, 1991). It also lists about 20,000 second-language speakers (Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 18th Edition, 1991). 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 Kuanua sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Austronesian
  2. Malayo-Polynesian
  3. Eastern Malayo-Polynesian
  4. Oceanic
  5. Western Oceanic linkage
  6. Meso Melanesian linkage
  7. New Ireland-Northwest Solomonic linkage
  8. St George linkage
  9. Patpatar-Minigir-Tolai
  10. Minigir-Tolai
  11. Kuanua

Related languages

Other languages in the Minigir-Tolai group:

More about Kuanua

Codes: ISO 639-3 ksd, Glottolog kuan1248. Glottolog macroarea: Papunesia.

Questions about Kuanua

Where is Kuanua spoken?

Kuanua is spoken in Papua New Guinea. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Kuanua?

Wikidata gives about 61,000 first-language speakers (Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 18th Edition, 1991). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled. It also lists about 20,000 second-language speakers (Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 18th Edition, 1991).

Which language family is Kuanua in?

Glottolog places Kuanua in the Austronesian family, in the branch Malayo-Polynesian, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Oceanic, Western Oceanic linkage, Meso Melanesian linkage, New Ireland-Northwest Solomonic linkage, St George linkage, Patpatar-Minigir-Tolai and Minigir-Tolai.

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.