World Language Map

Where is Selkup spoken?

Selkup is an Uralic language, spoken in 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

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  • 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 Selkup is spoken

Selkup is spoken in one country: Russia.

Country
Russia

On the map, Selkup 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 Selkup.

How many people speak Selkup?

Wikidata gives about 600 speakers (Selkup, 2022). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Shifting. Glottolog lists it as shifting: the youngest speakers are adults, and children are growing up speaking another language.

Where Selkup sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Uralic
  2. Samoyedic
  3. Kamas-Selkup
  4. Selkup

More about Selkup

Codes: ISO 639-3 sel, Glottolog selk1253. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Selkup

Where is Selkup spoken?

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

How many people speak Selkup?

Wikidata gives about 600 speakers (Selkup, 2022). 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 Selkup in?

Glottolog places Selkup in the Uralic family, in the branch Samoyedic and Kamas-Selkup.

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