World Language Map

Where is Waiwai spoken?

Waiwai is a Cariban language, spoken in Brazil and Guyana. 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 Waiwai is spoken

Waiwai is spoken in 2 countries: Brazil and Guyana.

Country
Brazil
Guyana

On the map, Waiwai 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 Waiwai.

How many people speak Waiwai?

Wikidata holds no speaker count for this language.

Status: Shifting. Glottolog lists it as shifting: the youngest speakers are adults, and children are growing up speaking another language.

Where Waiwai sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Cariban
  2. Parukotoan
  3. Waiwaian
  4. Waiwai

Related languages

Other languages in the Waiwaian group:

More about Waiwai

Codes: ISO 639-3 waw, Glottolog waiw1244. Glottolog macroarea: South America.

Questions about Waiwai

Where is Waiwai spoken?

Waiwai is spoken in Brazil and Guyana. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

Which language family is Waiwai in?

Glottolog places Waiwai in the Cariban family, in the branch Parukotoan and Waiwaian.

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