World Language Map

Where is Tiwi spoken?

Tiwi is a language isolate, spoken in Australia. It is marked on the map by a ringed point.

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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 Tiwi is spoken

Tiwi is spoken in one country: Australia.

Country
Australia

Tiwi 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 Tiwi?

Wikidata gives about 2,040 speakers (census in Australia, 2016). 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 Tiwi sits in the language family tree

Tiwi is a language isolate: Glottolog knows of no language that it is demonstrably related to.

More about Tiwi

Codes: ISO 639-3 tiw, Glottolog tiwi1244. Glottolog macroarea: Australia.

Questions about Tiwi

Where is Tiwi spoken?

Tiwi is spoken in Australia. On the map it is shown as a single point, because no open area map covers it.

How many people speak Tiwi?

Wikidata gives about 2,040 speakers (census in Australia, 2016). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Is Tiwi related to any other language?

Glottolog lists Tiwi as a language isolate: a language with no demonstrated relatives. It sits on its own in the classification.

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