World Language Map

Where is Xibe spoken?

Xibe (ᠰᡞᠪᡝ ᡤᡞᠰᡠᠨ) is a Tungusic language, spoken in China and Kazakhstan. 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

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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 Xibe is spoken

Xibe is spoken in 2 countries: China and Kazakhstan.

Country
China
Kazakhstan

On the map, Xibe 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 Xibe.

How many people speak Xibe?

Wikidata gives about 30,000 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Threatened. Glottolog lists it as threatened: it is still spoken by all generations, but there are signs that the number of speakers is falling.

Where Xibe sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Tungusic
  2. Manchu-Jurchen
  3. Manchu-Xibe
  4. Xibe

Related languages

Other languages in the Manchu-Xibe group:

More about Xibe

Codes: ISO 639-3 sjo, Glottolog xibe1242. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Xibe

Where is Xibe spoken?

Xibe is spoken in China and Kazakhstan. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Xibe?

Wikidata gives about 30,000 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 Xibe in?

Glottolog places Xibe in the Tungusic family, in the branch Manchu-Jurchen and Manchu-Xibe.

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