World Language Map

Where is Romansh spoken?

Romansh (rumantsch) is an Indo-European language, spoken in Switzerland, Austria and Italy. 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 Romansh is spoken

Romansh is spoken in 3 countries: Switzerland, Austria and Italy. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Switzerland0.5%44,303
AustriaNot givenNot given
ItalyNot givenNot given

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Romansh 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 Romansh.

How many people speak Romansh?

Wikidata gives about 40,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 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 Romansh sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Indo-European
  2. Classical Indo-European
  3. Italic
  4. Latino-Faliscan
  5. Latinic
  6. Imperial Latin
  7. Romance
  8. Italo-Western Romance
  9. Western Romance
  10. Shifted Western Romance
  11. Northwestern Shifted Romance
  12. Gallo-Rhaetian
  13. Romansh

More about Romansh

Codes: ISO 639-3 roh, Glottolog roma1326. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Romansh is a Romance language, descended from Latin. Latin’s footprint: the Roman Empire at its height → Latin spread along Roman roads →

Questions about Romansh

Where is Romansh spoken?

Romansh is spoken in Switzerland, Austria and Italy. Unicode CLDR puts it at 0.5% of the population of Switzerland, which is about 44,303 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Romansh?

Wikidata gives about 40,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 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 Romansh in?

Glottolog places Romansh in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Italic, Latino-Faliscan, Latinic, Imperial Latin, Romance, Italo-Western Romance, Western Romance, Shifted Western Romance, Northwestern Shifted Romance and Gallo-Rhaetian.

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