World Language Map

Where is Wayuu spoken?

Wayuu (Wayuunaiki) is an Arawakan language, spoken in Colombia and Venezuela. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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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 Wayuu is spoken

Wayuu is spoken in 2 countries: Colombia and Venezuela. 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
Colombia0.3%133,889
VenezuelaNot 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, Wayuu is drawn as an area from Walker and Ribeiro 2011 (Arawakan). The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18643894), 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 Wayuu.

How many people speak Wayuu?

Wikidata gives about 300,000 speakers (ethnologue.com). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Threatened. Glottolog lists it as threatened: it is still spoken by all generations, but there are signs that the number of speakers is falling.

Where Wayuu sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Arawakan
  2. Caribbean Arawakan
  3. Guajiro-Paraujano
  4. Wayuu

Related languages

Other languages in the Guajiro-Paraujano group:

More about Wayuu

Codes: ISO 639-3 guc, Glottolog wayu1243. Glottolog macroarea: South America.

Questions about Wayuu

Where is Wayuu spoken?

Wayuu is spoken in Colombia and Venezuela. Unicode CLDR puts it at 0.3% of the population of Colombia, which is about 133,889 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Walker and Ribeiro 2011 (Arawakan).

How many people speak Wayuu?

Wikidata gives about 300,000 speakers (ethnologue.com). 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 Wayuu in?

Glottolog places Wayuu in the Arawakan family, in the branch Caribbean Arawakan and Guajiro-Paraujano.

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