World Language Map

Chibchan languages map

19 Chibchan languages are on the map, most of them in Colombia, Panama and Costa Rica. The best-known members include Teribe, Malayo and Rama. Only this family is drawn; tap the map to list every language at a spot.

Tap or scroll to load the interactive map

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.

The Chibchan family at a glance

  • 19languages
  • 8drawn as areas
  • 11shown as points

Colours on the map mark the ten largest families; this page’s filter shows Chibchan alone. Areas are generalisations from published atlases and overlap with the areas of other families.

Biggest Chibchan languages

By approximate speaker counts from Wikidata, each with its source and year on its own page.

  1. Where is Teribe spoken? (about 3,000 speakers)
  2. Where is Malayo spoken? (about 1,850 speakers)
  3. Where is Rama spoken? (about 740 speakers)

Where Chibchan languages are spoken

Countries with the most Chibchan languages, with the number of languages in brackets.

All 19 Chibchan languages, A to Z

Questions about Chibchan languages

How many Chibchan languages are there?

19 living Chibchan languages are on this map, in the Glottolog classification. Other classifications group languages differently, so totals vary.

Where are Chibchan languages spoken?

Colombia (11), Panama (6), Costa Rica (5), Venezuela (2), Honduras (1) and Nicaragua (1) have the most Chibchan languages, with the number of languages in brackets.

What are the biggest Chibchan languages?

By the approximate speaker counts Wikidata holds: Teribe (about 3,000), Malayo (about 1,850) and Rama (about 740). These figures differ between sources and years.

Embed this map

Copy this code into your web page. It is free to use. Please keep the link under the map, as it is how people find where the map comes from.