Where is Yabem spoken?

Yabem is an Austronesian language, spoken in Papua New Guinea. 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 Yabem is spoken

Yabem is spoken in one country: Papua New Guinea.

On the map, Yabem 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 Yabem.

How many people speak Yabem?

Wikidata holds no speaker count for this language.

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 Yabem sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Austronesian
  2. Malayo-Polynesian
  3. Eastern Malayo-Polynesian
  4. Oceanic
  5. Western Oceanic linkage
  6. North New Guinea linkage
  7. Huon Gulf
  8. North Huon Gulf linkage
  9. Yabem

Related languages

Other languages in the North Huon Gulf linkage group:

More about Yabem

Codes: ISO 639-3 jae, Glottolog yabe1254. Glottolog macroarea: Papunesia.

Questions about Yabem

Where is Yabem spoken?

Yabem is spoken in Papua New Guinea. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

Which language family is Yabem in?

Glottolog places Yabem in the Austronesian family, in the branch Malayo-Polynesian, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Oceanic, Western Oceanic linkage, North New Guinea linkage, Huon Gulf and North Huon Gulf linkage.

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