World Language Map

Where is Towa spoken?

Towa is a Kiowa-Tanoan language, spoken in the United States. 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 Towa is spoken

Towa is spoken in one country: the United States.

Country
United States

Towa 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 Towa?

Wikidata gives about 3,000 first-language speakers (Red Book of Endangered Languages, 2007). 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 Towa sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Kiowa-Tanoan
  2. Towa

Related languages

Other languages in the Kiowa-Tanoan group:

More about Towa

Codes: ISO 639-3 tow, Glottolog jeme1245. Glottolog macroarea: North America.

Questions about Towa

Where is Towa spoken?

Towa is spoken in the United States. On the map it is shown as a single point, because no open area map covers it.

How many people speak Towa?

Wikidata gives about 3,000 first-language speakers (Red Book of Endangered Languages, 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 Towa in?

Glottolog places Towa in the Kiowa-Tanoan family.

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