World Language Map

Where is S'gaw Karen spoken?

S'gaw Karen is a Sino-Tibetan language, spoken in Myanmar and Thailand. 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 S'gaw Karen is spoken

S'gaw Karen is spoken in 2 countries: Myanmar and Thailand.

Country
Myanmar
Thailand

On the map, S'gaw Karen 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 S'gaw Karen.

How many people speak S'gaw Karen?

Wikidata gives about 4 million speakers (Wikidata, with no source given). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

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

Where S'gaw Karen sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies S'gaw Karen as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Sino-Tibetan
  2. Karenic
  3. Southern Karen
  4. Sgaw
  5. S'gaw Karen

More about S'gaw Karen

Codes: ISO 639-3 ksw, Glottolog sgaw1245. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about S'gaw Karen

Where is S'gaw Karen spoken?

S'gaw Karen is spoken in Myanmar and Thailand. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak S'gaw Karen?

Wikidata gives about 4 million speakers (Wikidata, with no source given). 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 S'gaw Karen in?

Glottolog places S'gaw Karen in the Sino-Tibetan family, in the branch Karenic, Southern Karen and Sgaw.

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