World Language Map

Where is Nhengatu spoken?

Nhengatu (ñe'engatú) is a Tupian language, spoken in Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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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 Nhengatu is spoken

Nhengatu is spoken in 3 countries: Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela.

Country
Brazil
Colombia
Venezuela

On the map, Nhengatu 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 Nhengatu.

How many people speak Nhengatu?

Wikidata gives about 8,000 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given). 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 Nhengatu sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Tupian
  2. Eastern Tupian
  3. Maweti-Guarani
  4. Aweti-Guarani
  5. Tupi-Guarani
  6. Southern Tupi-Guarani
  7. Tupi-Guarani Subgroup III
  8. Nhengatu

More about Nhengatu

Codes: ISO 639-3 yrl, Glottolog nhen1239. Glottolog macroarea: South America.

Questions about Nhengatu

Where is Nhengatu spoken?

Nhengatu is spoken in Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Nhengatu?

Wikidata gives about 8,000 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given). 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 Nhengatu in?

Glottolog places Nhengatu in the Tupian family, in the branch Eastern Tupian, Maweti-Guarani, Aweti-Guarani, Tupi-Guarani, Southern Tupi-Guarani and Tupi-Guarani Subgroup III.

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