World Language Map

Where is Karelian spoken?

Karelian (karjalan kieli) is an Uralic language, spoken in Finland and Russia. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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.

Where Karelian is spoken

Karelian is spoken in 2 countries: Finland and Russia.

Country
Finland
Russia

On the map, Karelian 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 Karelian.

How many people speak Karelian?

Wikidata gives about 36,000 first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2010). 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 Karelian sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Uralic
  2. Finnic
  3. Coastal Finnic
  4. Neva
  5. North Finnic
  6. Ladogan
  7. Karelian

Related languages

Other languages in the Ladogan group:

More about Karelian

Codes: ISO 639-3 krl, Glottolog kare1335. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Karelian

Where is Karelian spoken?

Karelian is spoken in Finland and Russia. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Karelian?

Wikidata gives about 36,000 first-language 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 Karelian in?

Glottolog places Karelian in the Uralic family, in the branch Finnic, Coastal Finnic, Neva, North Finnic and Ladogan.

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.