Where Cubeo is spoken
Cubeo is spoken in 3 countries: Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela.
On the map, Cubeo is drawn as an area from Queixalos and Renault-Lescure 2000. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18643631), 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 Cubeo.
How many people speak Cubeo?
Wikidata gives about 6,300 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given, 2009). 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 Cubeo sits in the language family tree
Glottolog classifies Cubeo as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.
- Tucanoan
- Eastern Tucanoan
- Western Eastern Tucanoan
- Cubeo-Desano
- Cubeo
More about Cubeo
Codes: ISO 639-3 cub, Glottolog cube1242. Glottolog macroarea: South America.
Questions about Cubeo
Where is Cubeo spoken?
Cubeo is spoken in Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela. On the map it is shown as an area from Queixalos and Renault-Lescure 2000.
How many people speak Cubeo?
Wikidata gives about 6,300 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given, 2009). 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 Cubeo in?
Glottolog places Cubeo in the Tucanoan family, in the branch Eastern Tucanoan, Western Eastern Tucanoan and Cubeo-Desano.