World Language Map

Where is Yei spoken?

Yei (bahasa Yei) is a Yam language, spoken in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. 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 Yei is spoken

Yei is spoken in 2 countries: Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.

Country
Indonesia
Papua New Guinea

On the map, Yei 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 Yei.

How many people speak Yei?

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 Yei sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Yam
  2. Morehead-Maro
  3. Yei

More about Yei

Codes: ISO 639-3 jei, Glottolog yeii1239. Glottolog macroarea: Papunesia.

Questions about Yei

Where is Yei spoken?

Yei is spoken in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

Which language family is Yei in?

Glottolog places Yei in the Yam family, in the branch Morehead-Maro.

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