World Language Map

Where is Shuar spoken?

Shuar is a Chicham language, spoken in Ecuador and Peru. It is marked on the map by a ringed point.

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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 Shuar is spoken

Shuar is spoken in 2 countries: Ecuador and Peru.

Country
Ecuador
Peru

Shuar has no area on the map because no open area map covers it. The ringed point is the position Glottolog gives for the language.

How many people speak Shuar?

Wikidata gives about 35,000 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given, 2007). 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 Shuar sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Chicham
  2. Shuaric
  3. Huambisa-Shuar
  4. Shuar

Related languages

Other languages in the Huambisa-Shuar group:

More about Shuar

Codes: ISO 639-3 jiv, Glottolog shua1257. Glottolog macroarea: South America.

Questions about Shuar

Where is Shuar spoken?

Shuar is spoken in Ecuador and Peru. On the map it is shown as a single point, because no open area map covers it.

How many people speak Shuar?

Wikidata gives about 35,000 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given, 2007). 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 Shuar in?

Glottolog places Shuar in the Chicham family, in the branch Shuaric and Huambisa-Shuar.

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