World Language Map

Where is Piaroa spoken?

Piaroa is a Saliban language, spoken in Colombia and Venezuela. It is marked on the map by a ringed point.

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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 Piaroa is spoken

Piaroa is spoken in 2 countries: Colombia and Venezuela.

Country
Colombia
Venezuela

Piaroa has no area on the map because no open area map covers it. The ringed point is the position Glottolog gives for the language.

How many people speak Piaroa?

Wikidata gives about 14,000 speakers (ethnologue.com, 2012). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Threatened. Glottolog lists it as threatened: it is still spoken by all generations, but there are signs that the number of speakers is falling.

Where Piaroa sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Saliban
  2. Maco-Piaroa
  3. Piaroa

Related languages

Other languages in the Maco-Piaroa group:

  • Maco (2,500 speakers)

More about Piaroa

Codes: ISO 639-3 pid, Glottolog piar1243. Glottolog macroarea: South America.

Questions about Piaroa

Where is Piaroa spoken?

Piaroa is spoken in Colombia and Venezuela. On the map it is shown as a single point, because no open area map covers it.

How many people speak Piaroa?

Wikidata gives about 14,000 speakers (ethnologue.com, 2012). 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 Piaroa in?

Glottolog places Piaroa in the Saliban family, in the branch Maco-Piaroa.

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