World Language Map

Where is Urak Lawoi' spoken?

Urak Lawoi' is an Austronesian language, spoken in Malaysia and Thailand. 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

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 Urak Lawoi' is spoken

Urak Lawoi' is spoken in 2 countries: Malaysia and Thailand.

Country
Malaysia
Thailand

On the map, Urak Lawoi' 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 Urak Lawoi'.

How many people speak Urak Lawoi'?

Wikidata gives about 5,000 first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2012). 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 Urak Lawoi' sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Urak Lawoi' as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Austronesian
  2. Malayo-Polynesian
  3. Malayo-Chamic
  4. Malayic
  5. Nuclear Malayic
  6. Greater Riau-Johoric
  7. Northeastern Peninsular Malay
  8. Urak Lawoi'

Related languages

Other languages in the Northeastern Peninsular Malay group:

More about Urak Lawoi'

Codes: ISO 639-3 urk, Glottolog urak1238. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Urak Lawoi'

Where is Urak Lawoi' spoken?

Urak Lawoi' is spoken in Malaysia and Thailand. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Urak Lawoi'?

Wikidata gives about 5,000 first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2012). 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 Urak Lawoi' in?

Glottolog places Urak Lawoi' in the Austronesian family, in the branch Malayo-Polynesian, Malayo-Chamic, Malayic, Nuclear Malayic, Greater Riau-Johoric and Northeastern Peninsular Malay.

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