Austronesian · Malayo-Polynesian
Tetum
Bahasa Tetun · Belo · Belu · Fehan · Teto · Tettum · Tetu · Tetun
Nearest relatives
- Deepest shared ancestor
- Timor-Babar
- 38 other languages on this map
Too many to list — and that is the finding. This language hangs high on the tree: its nearest relatives are the whole Timor-Babar branch, 38 languages at once, none of them closer than any other.
All equally close. Glottolog’s classification is a nesting without branch lengths, so this list cannot be ordered by how closely related its members are.
Measured between recorded points, not between speaker areas. Glottolog’s coordinate is frequently the midpoint of a dispersed population, so this is an order of magnitude rather than a survey.
Computed only among the 726 languages mapped here. A language whose family mostly lives outside Indonesia may have a nearer relative off this map.
Up the family tree
Each step up adds relatives and widens the ground they cover. Click a step to see it light up on the map.
| Level | Languages | Languages | Spans |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tetum | the language itself | ||
| Tetunic | 1 | ||
| Central Timoric A | 1 | ||
| Eastern Timor | 1 | ||
| Timor-Babar | 39 | 990 km | |
| Malayo-Polynesian | 464 | 5,010 km | |
| Austronesian | 464 | 5,010 km |
Bar length: languages on this map, on a log scale from 1 to 464. Spans: the distance between the two furthest recorded points, midpoint to midpoint — a floor, not the true extent.
- Glottocode
- tetu1245
- Glottolog’s permanent identifier for this language. Names change, and one name can mean several languages; the code does neither. This whole map is keyed on codes, never on names.
- ISO 639-3
- tet
- Endangerment status
- not endangered
- Glottolog’s AES assessment: an expert judgement of how far speakers have shifted to another language — not a measurement, not a census, and not a speaker count.
- Most extensive description
- Long grammar (300+ pages)
- Per Glottolog: the fullest kind of work ever published on this language.
- References in Glottolog
- 59 bibliography entries See its bibliography on Glottolog
- Coordinates
- 125.5280°E, 9.1122°S
- Territory
- Polygon present, from Glottography dataset derived from Asher and Moseley 2007 "Atlas of the World's Languages"
- Alternate names
- Bahasa Tetun · Belo · Belu · Fehan · Teto · Tettum · Tetu · Tetun
No speaker count is given. Glottolog carries no reliable figures and proprietary sources are not used. An unsourced number is worse than an absent one.
Sources
- Glottolog 5.3 as CLDF v5.3 · CC-BY-4.0
Hammarström, Harald & Forkel, Robert & Haspelmath, Martin & Bank, Sebastian. 2026. Glottolog 5.3. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
- Glottography dataset derived from Asher and Moseley 2007 "Atlas of the World's Languages" v2.0 · CC-BY-4.0
Asher, R. E. & Christopher J. Moseley (eds.) 2007. Atlas of the World's Languages. 2nd edn. Routledge.
- Glottography dataset derived from Schapper 2020 "Introduction to The Papuan languages of Timor, Alor and Pantar. Volume 3" v2.0 · CC-BY-4.0
Schapper, Antoinette. 2020. Introduction to The Papuan languages of Timor, Alor and Pantar. Volume 3. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. doi:10.1515/9781501511158-001.
- Natural Earth vector, 1:10m cultural and physical v5.1.2 · public-domain
Made with Natural Earth. Free vector and raster map data @ naturalearthdata.com. Public domain.
- CLDF dataset derived from Greenhill et al.'s "Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database" v0.1 · CC-BY-4.0
Greenhill, S.J., Blust, R. & Gray, R.D. (2008). The Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database: From Bioinformatics to Lexomics. Evolutionary Bioinformatics, 4:271-283. CLDF edition: lexibank/abvd v0.1.
- Grambank v1.0.3 · CC-BY-4.0
Skirgård, H., Haynie, H.J., Blasi, D.E. et al. (2023). Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss. Science Advances 9(16). Data: grambank/grambank v1.0.3.