World Language Map

Where is Tlingit spoken?

Tlingit (Lingít) is an Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit language, spoken in Canada and the United States. 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 Tlingit is spoken

Tlingit is spoken in 2 countries: Canada and the United States.

Country
Canada
United States

On the map, Tlingit 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 Tlingit.

How many people speak Tlingit?

Wikidata gives about 500 speakers (www12.statcan.gc.ca, 2016). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Nearly extinct. Glottolog lists it as nearly extinct: only a few elderly speakers are left.

Where Tlingit sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit
  2. Tlingit

More about Tlingit

Codes: ISO 639-3 tli, Glottolog tlin1245. Glottolog macroarea: North America.

Questions about Tlingit

Where is Tlingit spoken?

Tlingit 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 Tlingit?

Wikidata gives about 500 speakers (www12.statcan.gc.ca, 2016). 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 Tlingit in?

Glottolog places Tlingit in the Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit family.

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