Where is Pipil spoken?

Pipil is an Uto-Aztecan language, spoken in El Salvador. 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 Pipil is spoken

Pipil is spoken in one country: El Salvador.

On the map, Pipil 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 Pipil.

How many people speak Pipil?

Wikidata gives about 1,135 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given, 2024). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Nearly extinct. Glottolog lists it as nearly extinct: only a few elderly speakers are left.

Where Pipil sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Uto-Aztecan
  2. Southern Uto-Aztecan
  3. Corachol-Aztecan
  4. Aztec
  5. Eastern Nahuatl
  6. Isthmus-Pipil Nahuatl
  7. Pipil

More about Pipil

Codes: ISO 639-3 ppl, Glottolog pipi1250. Glottolog macroarea: North America.

Questions about Pipil

Where is Pipil spoken?

Pipil is spoken in El Salvador. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Pipil?

Wikidata gives about 1,135 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given, 2024). 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 Pipil in?

Glottolog places Pipil in the Uto-Aztecan family, in the branch Southern Uto-Aztecan, Corachol-Aztecan, Aztec, Eastern Nahuatl and Isthmus-Pipil Nahuatl.

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