Where is Lawi spoken?

Lawi is an Austroasiatic language, spoken in Laos. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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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 Lawi is spoken

Lawi is spoken in one country: Laos.

Country
Laos

On the map, Lawi 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 Lawi.

How many people speak Lawi?

Wikidata holds no speaker count for this language.

Status: Moribund. Glottolog lists it as moribund: the youngest speakers are middle-aged or older, and children are no longer learning it.

Where Lawi sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Austroasiatic
  2. Bahnaric
  3. West Bahnaric
  4. Lawi

Related languages

Other languages in the West Bahnaric group:

More about Lawi

Codes: ISO 639-3 lvi, Glottolog lawi1235. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Lawi

Where is Lawi spoken?

Lawi is spoken in Laos. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

Which language family is Lawi in?

Glottolog places Lawi in the Austroasiatic family, in the branch Bahnaric and West Bahnaric.

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