World Language Map

Where is Nanai spoken?

Nanai (На̄най хэсэни) is a Tungusic language, spoken in China and Russia. 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 Nanai is spoken

Nanai is spoken in 2 countries: China and Russia.

Country
China
Russia

On the map, Nanai 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 Nanai.

How many people speak Nanai?

Wikidata gives about 1,390 speakers (ethnologue.com, 2010). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

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

Where Nanai sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Tungusic
  2. Central-Western Tungusic
  3. Nanai

More about Nanai

Codes: ISO 639-3 gld, Glottolog nana1257. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Nanai

Where is Nanai spoken?

Nanai is spoken in China and Russia. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Nanai?

Wikidata gives about 1,390 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 Nanai in?

Glottolog places Nanai in the Tungusic family, in the branch Central-Western Tungusic.

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