World Language Map

Where is Pirahã spoken?

Pirahã is a language isolate, spoken in Brazil. 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 Pirahã is spoken

Pirahã is spoken in one country: Brazil.

Country
Brazil

On the map, Pirahã is drawn as an area from Queixalos and Renault-Lescure 2000. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18643631), 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 Pirahã.

How many people speak Pirahã?

Wikidata gives about 389 speakers (unesco.org, 2006). 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 Pirahã sits in the language family tree

Pirahã is a language isolate: Glottolog knows of no language that it is demonstrably related to.

More about Pirahã

Codes: ISO 639-3 myp, Glottolog pira1253. Glottolog macroarea: South America.

Questions about Pirahã

Where is Pirahã spoken?

Pirahã is spoken in Brazil. On the map it is shown as an area from Queixalos and Renault-Lescure 2000.

How many people speak Pirahã?

Wikidata gives about 389 speakers (unesco.org, 2006). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Is Pirahã related to any other language?

Glottolog lists Pirahã as a language isolate: a language with no demonstrated relatives. It sits on its own in the classification.

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