World Language Map

Where is Sawai spoken?

Sawai is an Austronesian language, spoken in Indonesia. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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The filter only changes what is drawn. Tap the map to list every language at a spot, whichever family is shown. You can also pick any family from its own page.

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 Sawai is spoken

Sawai is spoken in one country: Indonesia.

Country
Indonesia

On the map, Sawai 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 Sawai.

How many people speak Sawai?

Wikidata gives about 12,000 speakers (ethnologue.com). 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 Sawai sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Austronesian
  2. Malayo-Polynesian
  3. Eastern Malayo-Polynesian
  4. South Halmahera-West New Guinea
  5. Raja Ampat-South Halmahera
  6. South Halmahera
  7. Gebeic
  8. Central-Eastern South Halmahera
  9. Gamrange
  10. Sawai

More about Sawai

Codes: ISO 639-3 szw, Glottolog sawa1247. Glottolog macroarea: Papunesia.

Questions about Sawai

Where is Sawai spoken?

Sawai is spoken in Indonesia. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Sawai?

Wikidata gives about 12,000 speakers (ethnologue.com). 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 Sawai in?

Glottolog places Sawai in the Austronesian family, in the branch Malayo-Polynesian, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, South Halmahera-West New Guinea, Raja Ampat-South Halmahera, South Halmahera, Gebeic, Central-Eastern South Halmahera and Gamrange.

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