World Language Map

Where is Lakota spoken?

Lakota (Lakȟótiyapi) is a Siouan language, spoken in Canada and the United States. 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 Lakota is spoken

Lakota is spoken in 2 countries: Canada and the United States.

Country
Canada
United States

Lakota 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 Lakota?

Wikidata gives about 2,000 speakers (theworlddata.com, 2016). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Shifting. Glottolog lists it as shifting: the youngest speakers are adults, and children are growing up speaking another language.

Where Lakota sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Siouan
  2. Mississippi Valley
  3. Dakotan
  4. Sioux
  5. Lakota

Related languages

Other languages in the Sioux group:

More about Lakota

Codes: ISO 639-3 lkt, Glottolog lako1247. Glottolog macroarea: North America.

Questions about Lakota

Where is Lakota spoken?

Lakota is spoken in Canada and the United States. On the map it is shown as a single point, because no open area map covers it.

How many people speak Lakota?

Wikidata gives about 2,000 speakers (theworlddata.com, 2016). 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 Lakota in?

Glottolog places Lakota in the Siouan family, in the branch Mississippi Valley, Dakotan and Sioux.

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