World Language Map

Where is Rutul spoken?

Rutul (мыхаӀбишды чӀел) is a Nakh-Daghestanian language, spoken in Azerbaijan and Russia. 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 Rutul is spoken

Rutul is spoken in 2 countries: Azerbaijan and Russia.

Country
Azerbaijan
Russia

On the map, Rutul 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 Rutul.

How many people speak Rutul?

Wikidata gives about 47,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 2010). 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 Rutul sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Nakh-Daghestanian
  2. Daghestanian
  3. Lezgic
  4. Samur
  5. Western Samur
  6. Rutul

Related languages

Other languages in the Western Samur group:

More about Rutul

Codes: ISO 639-3 rut, Glottolog rutu1240. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Rutul

Where is Rutul spoken?

Rutul is spoken in Azerbaijan and Russia. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Rutul?

Wikidata gives about 47,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 2010). 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 Rutul in?

Glottolog places Rutul in the Nakh-Daghestanian family, in the branch Daghestanian, Lezgic, Samur and Western Samur.

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