World Language Map

Where is Matsés spoken?

Matsés is a Pano-Tacanan language, spoken in Brazil and Peru. 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 Matsés is spoken

Matsés is spoken in 2 countries: Brazil and Peru.

Country
Brazil
Peru

On the map, Matsés 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 Matsés.

How many people speak Matsés?

Wikidata gives about 2,200 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given, 2006). 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 Matsés sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Pano-Tacanan
  2. Panoan
  3. Mayoruna Branch
  4. Mayo Group
  5. Matses subgroup
  6. Matsés

Related languages

Other languages in the Matses subgroup group:

More about Matsés

Codes: ISO 639-3 mcf, Glottolog mats1244. Glottolog macroarea: South America.

Questions about Matsés

Where is Matsés spoken?

Matsés is spoken in Brazil and Peru. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Matsés?

Wikidata gives about 2,200 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given, 2006). 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 Matsés in?

Glottolog places Matsés in the Pano-Tacanan family, in the branch Panoan, Mayoruna Branch, Mayo Group and Matses subgroup.

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