World Language Map

Where is Yaeyama spoken?

Yaeyama is a Japonic language, spoken in Japan. It is marked on the map by a ringed point.

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Key

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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 Yaeyama is spoken

Yaeyama is spoken in one country: Japan.

Country
Japan

Yaeyama has no area on the map because no open area map covers it. The ringed point is the position Glottolog gives for the language.

How many people speak Yaeyama?

Wikidata gives about 48,000 speakers (ethnologue.com, 2000). 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 Yaeyama sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Japonic
  2. Ryukyuan
  3. Southern Ryukyu
  4. Macro-Yaeyama
  5. Yaeyama

Related languages

Other languages in the Macro-Yaeyama group:

More about Yaeyama

Codes: ISO 639-3 rys, Glottolog yaey1239. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Yaeyama

Where is Yaeyama spoken?

Yaeyama is spoken in Japan. On the map it is shown as a single point, because no open area map covers it.

How many people speak Yaeyama?

Wikidata gives about 48,000 speakers (ethnologue.com, 2000). 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 Yaeyama in?

Glottolog places Yaeyama in the Japonic family, in the branch Ryukyuan, Southern Ryukyu and Macro-Yaeyama.

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