World Language Map

Where is Pijin spoken?

Pijin is an Indo-European language, spoken in the Solomon Islands. It is marked on the map by a ringed point.

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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 Pijin is spoken

Pijin is spoken in one country: the Solomon Islands. 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
Solomon Islands82%595,975

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.

Pijin 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 Pijin?

Wikidata gives about 25,000 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given). 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 Pijin sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Indo-European
  2. Classical Indo-European
  3. Germanic
  4. Northwest Germanic
  5. West Germanic
  6. North Sea Germanic
  7. Anglo-Frisian
  8. Anglic
  9. Later Anglic
  10. Middle-Modern English
  11. Macro-English
  12. Pacific Creole English
  13. Early Melanesian Pidgin
  14. Pijin

Related languages

Other languages in the Early Melanesian Pidgin group:

More about Pijin

Codes: ISO 639-3 pis, Glottolog piji1239. Glottolog macroarea: Papunesia.

Questions about Pijin

Where is Pijin spoken?

Pijin is spoken in the Solomon Islands. Unicode CLDR puts it at 82% of the population of Solomon Islands, which is about 595,975 people. On the map it is shown as a single point, because no open area map covers it.

How many people speak Pijin?

Wikidata gives about 25,000 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given). 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 Pijin in?

Glottolog places Pijin in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Germanic, Northwest Germanic, West Germanic, North Sea Germanic, Anglo-Frisian, Anglic, Later Anglic, Middle-Modern English, Macro-English, Pacific Creole English and Early Melanesian Pidgin.

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