World Language Map

Where is Dhivehi spoken?

Dhivehi (ދިވެހިބަސް) is an Indo-European language, spoken in the Maldives and India. It is marked on the map by a ringed point.

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Key

Language families (largest ten)

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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 Dhivehi is spoken

Dhivehi is spoken in 2 countries: the Maldives and India. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Maldives98%381,081
IndiaNot givenNot given

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

Dhivehi 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 Dhivehi?

Wikidata gives about 341,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 2012). 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 Dhivehi sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Indo-European
  2. Classical Indo-European
  3. Indo-Iranian
  4. Indo-Aryan
  5. Middle-Modern Indo-Aryan
  6. Dhivehi-Sinhala
  7. Dhivehi

More about Dhivehi

Codes: ISO 639-3 div, Glottolog dhiv1236. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Dhivehi

Where is Dhivehi spoken?

Dhivehi is spoken in the Maldives and India. Unicode CLDR puts it at 98% of the population of Maldives, which is about 381,081 people. On the map it is shown as a single point, because no open area map covers it.

How many people speak Dhivehi?

Wikidata gives about 341,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 2012). 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 Dhivehi in?

Glottolog places Dhivehi in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Indo-Iranian, Indo-Aryan, Middle-Modern Indo-Aryan and Dhivehi-Sinhala.

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