World Language Map

Where is Min Nan Chinese spoken?

Min Nan Chinese (闽南语) is a Sino-Tibetan language, spoken in China, Taiwan and Macau. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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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 Min Nan Chinese is spoken

Min Nan Chinese is spoken in 3 countries: China, Taiwan and Macau. 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
China1.9%26,904,760
Taiwan57%13,449,321
Macau3.7%23,844

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, Min Nan Chinese 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 Min Nan Chinese.

How many people speak Min Nan Chinese?

Wikidata gives about 50.1 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). 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 Min Nan Chinese sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Min Nan Chinese as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Sino-Tibetan
  2. Sinitic
  3. Min
  4. Coastal Min
  5. Southern Min-Pu-Xian
  6. Southern Min
  7. Min Nan Chinese

More about Min Nan Chinese

Codes: ISO 639-3 nan, Glottolog minn1241. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Min Nan Chinese

Where is Min Nan Chinese spoken?

Min Nan Chinese is spoken in China, Taiwan and Macau. Unicode CLDR puts it at 1.9% of the population of China, which is about 26,904,760 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Min Nan Chinese?

Wikidata gives about 50.1 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). 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 Min Nan Chinese in?

Glottolog places Min Nan Chinese in the Sino-Tibetan family, in the branch Sinitic, Min, Coastal Min, Southern Min-Pu-Xian and Southern Min.

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