World Language Map

Where is Plains Cree spoken?

Plains Cree (ᓀᐦᐃᔭᐍᐏᐣ) is an Algic language, spoken in Canada and the United States. 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 Plains Cree is spoken

Plains Cree is spoken in 2 countries: Canada and the United States.

Country
Canada
United States

On the map, Plains Cree 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 Plains Cree.

How many people speak Plains Cree?

Wikidata gives about 34,000 first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 1982). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Moribund. Glottolog lists it as moribund: the youngest speakers are middle-aged or older, and children are no longer learning it.

Where Plains Cree sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Algic
  2. Algonquian-Blackfoot
  3. Algonquian
  4. Cree-Montagnais-Naskapi
  5. Cree
  6. Plains Creeic
  7. Plains Cree

Related languages

Other languages in the Plains Creeic group:

More about Plains Cree

Codes: ISO 639-3 crk, Glottolog plai1258. Glottolog macroarea: North America.

Questions about Plains Cree

Where is Plains Cree spoken?

Plains Cree is spoken in Canada and the United States. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Plains Cree?

Wikidata gives about 34,000 first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 1982). 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 Plains Cree in?

Glottolog places Plains Cree in the Algic family, in the branch Algonquian-Blackfoot, Algonquian, Cree-Montagnais-Naskapi, Cree and Plains Creeic.

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