World Language Map

Where is Mambae spoken?

Mambae is an Austronesian language, spoken in Timor-Leste. 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 Mambae is spoken

Mambae is spoken in one country: Timor-Leste.

Country
Timor-Leste

On the map, Mambae is drawn as an area from Edwards 2020 (Timor). The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18614098), 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 Mambae.

How many people speak Mambae?

Wikidata gives about 130,000 first-language speakers (ethnologue.com, 2010). 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 Mambae sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Austronesian
  2. Malayo-Polynesian
  3. Central Timor
  4. Mambae

Related languages

Other languages in the Central Timor group:

More about Mambae

Codes: ISO 639-3 mgm, Glottolog mamb1306. Glottolog macroarea: Papunesia.

Questions about Mambae

Where is Mambae spoken?

Mambae is spoken in Timor-Leste. On the map it is shown as an area from Edwards 2020 (Timor).

How many people speak Mambae?

Wikidata gives about 130,000 first-language speakers (ethnologue.com, 2010). 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 Mambae in?

Glottolog places Mambae in the Austronesian family, in the branch Malayo-Polynesian and Central Timor.

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