World Language Map

Where is Tai Dam spoken?

Tai Dam is a Tai-Kadai language, spoken in Vietnam, China, Laos 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 Tai Dam is spoken

Tai Dam is spoken in 4 countries: Vietnam, China, Laos and Thailand. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Vietnam0.7%729,737
ChinaNot givenNot given
LaosNot givenNot given
ThailandNot givenNot given

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Tai Dam 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 Tai Dam.

How many people speak Tai Dam?

Wikidata gives about 760,000 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 Tai Dam sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Tai-Kadai
  2. Kam-Tai
  3. Daic-Beic
  4. Daic
  5. Central-Southwestern Tai
  6. Wenma-Southwestern Tai
  7. Sapa-Southwestern Tai
  8. Southwestern Tai
  9. Southwestern Tai P
  10. Chiang Saeng
  11. Black Tai
  12. Tai Dam

Related languages

Other languages in the Black Tai group:

More about Tai Dam

Codes: ISO 639-3 blt, Glottolog taid1247. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Tai Dam

Where is Tai Dam spoken?

Tai Dam is spoken in Vietnam, China, Laos and Thailand. Unicode CLDR puts it at 0.7% of the population of Vietnam, which is about 729,737 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Tai Dam?

Wikidata gives about 760,000 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 Tai Dam in?

Glottolog places Tai Dam in the Tai-Kadai family, in the branch Kam-Tai, Daic-Beic, Daic, Central-Southwestern Tai, Wenma-Southwestern Tai, Sapa-Southwestern Tai, Southwestern Tai, Southwestern Tai P, Chiang Saeng and Black Tai.

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