World Language Map

Where is Tetum spoken?

Tetum (Tetun) is an Austronesian language, spoken in Timor-Leste and Indonesia. 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 Tetum is spoken

Tetum is spoken in 2 countries: Timor-Leste and Indonesia. 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
Timor-Leste59%889,077
IndonesiaNot 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, Tetum is drawn as an area from Edwards 2020 (Timor). The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18614098), 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 Tetum.

How many people speak Tetum?

Wikidata gives about 464,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 2011). 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 Tetum sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Austronesian
  2. Malayo-Polynesian
  3. Timor-Babar
  4. Eastern Timor
  5. Central Timoric A
  6. Tetunic
  7. Tetum

Related languages

Other languages in the Tetunic group:

More about Tetum

Codes: ISO 639-3 tet, Glottolog tetu1245. Glottolog macroarea: Papunesia.

Questions about Tetum

Where is Tetum spoken?

Tetum is spoken in Timor-Leste and Indonesia. Unicode CLDR puts it at 59% of the population of Timor-Leste, which is about 889,077 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Edwards 2020 (Timor).

How many people speak Tetum?

Wikidata gives about 464,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 2011). 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 Tetum in?

Glottolog places Tetum in the Austronesian family, in the branch Malayo-Polynesian, Timor-Babar, Eastern Timor, Central Timoric A and Tetunic.

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