World Language Map

Where is Tuvinian spoken?

Tuvinian (Тыва дыл) is a Turkic language, spoken in Russia, China and Mongolia. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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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 Tuvinian is spoken

Tuvinian is spoken in 3 countries: Russia, China and Mongolia. 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
Russia0.1%183,067
ChinaNot givenNot given
MongoliaNot 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, Tuvinian 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 Tuvinian.

How many people speak Tuvinian?

Wikidata gives about 297,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 2010). 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 Tuvinian sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Turkic
  2. Common Turkic
  3. South Siberian Turkic
  4. Sayan-Yenisei Turkic
  5. Sayan
  6. Tuvinian

Related languages

Other languages in the Sayan group:

More about Tuvinian

Codes: ISO 639-3 tyv, Glottolog tuvi1240. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Tuvinian

Where is Tuvinian spoken?

Tuvinian is spoken in Russia, China and Mongolia. Unicode CLDR puts it at 0.1% of the population of Russia, which is about 183,067 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Tuvinian?

Wikidata gives about 297,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 2010). 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 Tuvinian in?

Glottolog places Tuvinian in the Turkic family, in the branch Common Turkic, South Siberian Turkic, Sayan-Yenisei Turkic and Sayan.

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