World Language Map

Where is Yanomám spoken?

Yanomám (Yąnomamɨ) is a Yanomamic language, spoken in Brazil and Venezuela. 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 Yanomám is spoken

Yanomám is spoken in 2 countries: Brazil and Venezuela.

Country
Brazil
Venezuela

On the map, Yanomám is drawn as an area from Queixalos and Renault-Lescure 2000. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18643631), 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 Yanomám.

How many people speak Yanomám?

Wikidata gives about 6,000 speakers (ethnologue.com, 2006). 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 Yanomám sits in the language family tree

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

  1. Yanomamic
  2. Ninam-Yanomam-Yaroame
  3. Yanomam-Yaroame
  4. Yanomam-Yanimamo
  5. Yanomám

Related languages

Other languages in the Yanomam-Yanimamo group:

More about Yanomám

Codes: ISO 639-3 wca, Glottolog yano1262. Glottolog macroarea: South America.

Questions about Yanomám

Where is Yanomám spoken?

Yanomám is spoken in Brazil and Venezuela. On the map it is shown as an area from Queixalos and Renault-Lescure 2000.

How many people speak Yanomám?

Wikidata gives about 6,000 speakers (ethnologue.com, 2006). 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 Yanomám in?

Glottolog places Yanomám in the Yanomamic family, in the branch Ninam-Yanomam-Yaroame, Yanomam-Yaroame and Yanomam-Yanimamo.

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