Language families
726 regional languages of Indonesia, coloured by the family they belong to — languages that descend from a single common ancestor.
Hover a branch of the genealogical tree and every territory in that family lights up on the map. Click a territory and the tree opens that language’s line of descent.
Distribution per atlas sources, 1990–2020 — not a census of speakers today. Method
Display
No family selected yet.
Use the arrow keys to pan the map, plus and minus to zoom, and zero to return to the full view. To select a language, use the family tree or the index of families below the map.
How to read this map
- Colour marks the family
- One colour, one family. Which colour lands on which family means nothing: two similar colours are not two related families, and closeness in colour must never be read as closeness in descent. Colours stay muted until you choose a family — the one you choose becomes the only saturated thing on the map.
- A ring means a point, not a territory
- Where no territory data exists, all that is drawn is one approximate point. A point is never inflated into an area.
- Hatching marks endangerment
- The denser the hatching, the closer the language is to extinction. Hatching is used so that colour can keep carrying family.
- Grey means no data yet
- Land not covered by a colour is territory the polygon sources do not reach. The coastline is known; the language distribution there is unrecorded — so it stays grey and is not clickable.
Selection cleared
Families
+44 families
- Coverage
- 421 of 726 languages have a territory (58%); the rest are points only.
- The rest are not unfinished work. The speaker areas on this map come from two published atlases, each with its own regional scope; a language outside that scope has no recorded territory to draw, so it is drawn as a point.
Distribution as described by atlas sources, 1990–2020
Language boundaries are gradients rather than lines. Boundaries are drawn as hairlines to keep that in view.
Sources: Glottolog 5.3 (CC-BY-4.0), Glottography (CC-BY-4.0), Natural Earth (public domain).
Endangerment status
- not endangered134
- threatened270
- shifting224
- moribund60
- nearly extinct14
- extinct24
Endangerment is drawn as hatch density over the family colour rather than as a colour of its own: hue already carries family, so the two layers stay readable at once. Status follows Glottolog AES for all 726 languages.
What is a language family?
A language family is a group of languages shown to descend from one common ancestor language — a family in the genealogical sense. Javanese, Balinese, Tagalog and Māori all belong to Austronesian, for instance. The tree on this page is that genealogy.
How is that genealogy known?
The branchings in this tree are not groupings by how alike languages sound. They are the findings of the comparative method: two languages are held to be related when their sounds correspond regularly — not resembling each other here and there, but patterned and predictable — and when they share innovations no other relative has. Worth knowing: some branches are far better established than others, and this tree follows one source, Glottolog 5.3, rather than a consensus of all scholars. Austronesian’s deep branches have been studied for over a century; some of the groupings in Papua are still argued over.
One language, climbed a level at a time
Take a single language and climb its ancestry. Each level adds relatives, and each level widens the ground those relatives occupy. That widening is what the colours on the map carry — one colour is one top level.
| Level | Languages | Spans |
|---|---|---|
| Bima | the language itself | |
| East Sumbawa | 3 | 50 kmKolo to Sangar |
| Bima-Lembata | 43 | 660 kmSangar to Alorese |
| Malayo-Polynesian | 464 | 5,010 kmKayupulau to Sikule |
| Austronesian | 464 | 5,010 kmKayupulau to Sikule |
At the top: Austronesian, 464 languages on this map, spanning 5,010 km. That is one colour on the map above — and Bima is one small patch inside it.
Span is the distance between the two furthest-apart recorded points in that branch, so it is a floor. A single language gets no figure: one point has no extent.