World Language Map

Where is Yele spoken?

Yele is a language isolate, 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 Yele is spoken

Yele is spoken in one country: Papua New Guinea.

Country
Papua New Guinea

On the map, Yele 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 Yele.

How many people speak Yele?

Wikidata gives about 5,000 speakers (A Grammar of Yélî Dnye (1st edition), 2011). 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 Yele sits in the language family tree

Yele is a language isolate: Glottolog knows of no language that it is demonstrably related to.

More about Yele

Codes: ISO 639-3 yle, Glottolog yele1255. Glottolog macroarea: Papunesia.

Questions about Yele

Where is Yele spoken?

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

How many people speak Yele?

Wikidata gives about 5,000 speakers (A Grammar of Yélî Dnye (1st edition), 2011). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Is Yele related to any other language?

Glottolog lists Yele as a language isolate: a language with no demonstrated relatives. It sits on its own in the classification.

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