World Language Map

Where is Mi'kmaq spoken?

Mi'kmaq is an Algic language, spoken in Canada and the United States. 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

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  • 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 Mi'kmaq is spoken

Mi'kmaq is spoken in 2 countries: Canada and the United States.

Country
Canada
United States

On the map, Mi'kmaq 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 Mi'kmaq.

How many people speak Mi'kmaq?

Wikidata gives about 8,270 speakers (Ethnologue, 2011). 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 Mi'kmaq sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Mi'kmaq as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Algic
  2. Algonquian-Blackfoot
  3. Algonquian
  4. Eastern Algonquian
  5. Maritimes-Southern New England Algonquian
  6. Northern Eastern Algonquian
  7. Micmacic
  8. Mi'kmaq

Related languages

Other languages in the Micmacic group:

More about Mi'kmaq

Codes: ISO 639-3 mic, Glottolog mikm1235. Glottolog macroarea: North America.

Questions about Mi'kmaq

Where is Mi'kmaq spoken?

Mi'kmaq is spoken in Canada and the United States. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Mi'kmaq?

Wikidata gives about 8,270 speakers (Ethnologue, 2011). 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 Mi'kmaq in?

Glottolog places Mi'kmaq in the Algic family, in the branch Algonquian-Blackfoot, Algonquian, Eastern Algonquian, Maritimes-Southern New England Algonquian, Northern Eastern Algonquian and Micmacic.

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