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Where is Western Apache spoken?

Western Apache is an Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit language, spoken in the United States. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
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  • Afro-Asiatic
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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 Western Apache is spoken

Western Apache is spoken in one country: the United States.

Country
United States

On the map, Western Apache 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 Western Apache.

How many people speak Western Apache?

Wikidata gives about 13,000 first-language speakers (census.gov, 2013). 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 Western Apache sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit
  2. Athabaskan-Eyak
  3. Athabaskan
  4. Apachean
  5. Southwestern Apachean
  6. Western Southwestern Apachean
  7. Western Apache

Related languages

Other languages in the Western Southwestern Apachean group:

More about Western Apache

Codes: ISO 639-3 apw, Glottolog west2615. Glottolog macroarea: North America.

Questions about Western Apache

Where is Western Apache spoken?

Western Apache is spoken in the United States. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Western Apache?

Wikidata gives about 13,000 first-language speakers (census.gov, 2013). 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 Western Apache in?

Glottolog places Western Apache in the Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit family, in the branch Athabaskan-Eyak, Athabaskan, Apachean, Southwestern Apachean and Western Southwestern Apachean.

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