World Language Map

Where is Vangunu spoken?

Vangunu is an Austronesian language, spoken in the Solomon Islands. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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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 Vangunu is spoken

Vangunu is spoken in one country: the Solomon Islands.

Country
Solomon Islands

On the map, Vangunu 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 Vangunu.

How many people speak Vangunu?

Wikidata gives about 910 speakers (Ethnologue, 1999). 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 Vangunu sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Austronesian
  2. Malayo-Polynesian
  3. Eastern Malayo-Polynesian
  4. Oceanic
  5. Western Oceanic linkage
  6. Meso Melanesian linkage
  7. New Ireland-Northwest Solomonic linkage
  8. St George linkage
  9. Northwest Solomonic
  10. New Georgia
  11. East New Georgia
  12. Marovo-Vangunu
  13. Vangunu

Related languages

Other languages in the Marovo-Vangunu group:

More about Vangunu

Codes: ISO 639-3 mpr, Glottolog vang1243. Glottolog macroarea: Papunesia.

Questions about Vangunu

Where is Vangunu spoken?

Vangunu is spoken in the Solomon Islands. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Vangunu?

Wikidata gives about 910 speakers (Ethnologue, 1999). 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 Vangunu in?

Glottolog places Vangunu in the Austronesian family, in the branch Malayo-Polynesian, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Oceanic, Western Oceanic linkage, Meso Melanesian linkage, New Ireland-Northwest Solomonic linkage, St George linkage, Northwest Solomonic, New Georgia, East New Georgia and Marovo-Vangunu.

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