World Language Map

Where is Nauru spoken?

Nauru (Dorerin Naoero) is an Austronesian language, spoken in Nauru. 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 Nauru is spoken

Nauru is spoken in one country: Nauru. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Nauru70%6,924

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Nauru 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 Nauru.

How many people speak Nauru?

Wikidata gives about 9,300 first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2013). It also lists about 1,000 second-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2013). 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 Nauru sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Austronesian
  2. Malayo-Polynesian
  3. Eastern Malayo-Polynesian
  4. Oceanic
  5. Micronesian
  6. Kosraean-Nauruan
  7. Nauru

Related languages

Other languages in the Kosraean-Nauruan group:

More about Nauru

Codes: ISO 639-3 nau, Glottolog naur1243. Glottolog macroarea: Papunesia.

Questions about Nauru

Where is Nauru spoken?

Nauru is spoken in Nauru. Unicode CLDR puts it at 70% of the population of Nauru, which is about 6,924 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Nauru?

Wikidata gives about 9,300 first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2013). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled. It also lists about 1,000 second-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2013).

Which language family is Nauru in?

Glottolog places Nauru in the Austronesian family, in the branch Malayo-Polynesian, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Oceanic, Micronesian and Kosraean-Nauruan.

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