World Language Map

Where is Roviana spoken?

Roviana is an Austronesian language, spoken in the Solomon Islands. 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 Roviana is spoken

Roviana is spoken in one country: the Solomon Islands. 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
Solomon Islands1.4%10,175

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, Roviana 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 Roviana.

How many people speak Roviana?

Wikidata holds no speaker count for this language. The table above has rough per-country estimates from Unicode CLDR.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where Roviana sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Austronesian
  2. Malayo-Polynesian
  3. Eastern Malayo-Polynesian
  4. Oceanic
  5. Western Oceanic linkage
  6. Meso Melanesian linkage
  7. New Ireland-Northwest Solomonic linkage
  8. St George linkage
  9. Northwest Solomonic
  10. New Georgia
  11. East New Georgia
  12. Rovianic
  13. Roviana

More about Roviana

Codes: ISO 639-3 rug, Glottolog rovi1238. Glottolog macroarea: Papunesia.

Questions about Roviana

Where is Roviana spoken?

Roviana is spoken in the Solomon Islands. Unicode CLDR puts it at 1.4% of the population of Solomon Islands, which is about 10,175 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

Which language family is Roviana in?

Glottolog places Roviana in the Austronesian family, in the branch Malayo-Polynesian, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Oceanic, Western Oceanic linkage, Meso Melanesian linkage, New Ireland-Northwest Solomonic linkage, St George linkage, Northwest Solomonic, New Georgia, East New Georgia and Rovianic.

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