World Language Map

Where is Gilbertese spoken?

Gilbertese (Taetae ni Kiribati) is an Austronesian language, spoken in Kiribati, Fiji, the Solomon Islands and Tuvalu. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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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 Gilbertese is spoken

Gilbertese is spoken in 4 countries: Kiribati, Fiji, the Solomon Islands and Tuvalu. 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
Kiribati60%69,927
FijiNot givenNot given
Solomon IslandsNot givenNot given
TuvaluNot 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.

On the map, Gilbertese 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 Gilbertese.

How many people speak Gilbertese?

Wikidata gives about 116,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 2010). 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 Gilbertese sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Austronesian
  2. Malayo-Polynesian
  3. Eastern Malayo-Polynesian
  4. Oceanic
  5. Micronesian
  6. Central Micronesian
  7. Gilbertese

More about Gilbertese

Codes: ISO 639-3 gil, Glottolog gilb1244. Glottolog macroarea: Papunesia.

Questions about Gilbertese

Where is Gilbertese spoken?

Gilbertese is spoken in Kiribati, Fiji, the Solomon Islands and Tuvalu. Unicode CLDR puts it at 60% of the population of Kiribati, which is about 69,927 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Gilbertese?

Wikidata gives about 116,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 2010). 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 Gilbertese in?

Glottolog places Gilbertese in the Austronesian family, in the branch Malayo-Polynesian, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Oceanic, Micronesian and Central Micronesian.

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