World Language Map

Where is Western Dani spoken?

Western Dani (bahasa Dani Barat) is a Nuclear Trans New Guinea language, spoken in Indonesia. 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 Western Dani is spoken

Western Dani is spoken in one country: Indonesia.

Country
Indonesia

On the map, Western Dani 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 Dani.

How many people speak Western Dani?

Wikidata gives about 180,000 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given, 1993). 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 Western Dani sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  2. Dani
  3. Central Dani
  4. Western Dani

More about Western Dani

Codes: ISO 639-3 dnw, Glottolog west2594. Glottolog macroarea: Papunesia.

Questions about Western Dani

Where is Western Dani spoken?

Western Dani is spoken in Indonesia. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Western Dani?

Wikidata gives about 180,000 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given, 1993). 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 Dani in?

Glottolog places Western Dani in the Nuclear Trans New Guinea family, in the branch Dani and Central Dani.

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