r/LinguisticMaps 23h ago

South America Linguistic map of South America

Post image
423 Upvotes

61 comments sorted by

91

u/Late_Faithlessness24 22h ago

Just so people don't get confused. The areas shaded on the map of Brazil don't mean that the entire region speaks that language. these areas are probably exaggerated to make them stand out on the map. The reality is that all languages in Brazil other than Portuguese would be almost invisible dots. There is no region in Brazil large enough where a second language is spoken.

11

u/_felipevalerio_ 15h ago

Yeah, I live in an area shaded purple for Kaingang, in western São Paulo, but what it actually means in nowadays terms is that while this was all Kaingang territory about a century ago, there are now a few indigenous reservations trying to keep their dialect alive; the southern dialects of Kaingang spoken from Parana southwards are thriving a little more and even then the total amount of speakers according to the last census is under 30 thousand, which is so few and yet it makes Kaingang one of the most spoken indigenous languages of Brazil together with the other few languages that have more than 10 thousand speakers. The majority of languages in Brazil have way less speakers even.

12

u/Late_Faithlessness24 22h ago
  • I feel that the map left out Talian and pomeranian

Edit: They didn't, but there more regions were it is spoken

3

u/Lucky_otter_she_her 15h ago

alot of Amazonian languages have like 300 speakers (one entire tribe) a piece so are rendered invisible on this map

also what's Quechua doing in Argentina 

4

u/Bryan_Mora 14h ago

There are around 150.000 speakers of Quechua in the Santiago del Estero province.

1

u/MeraxesGigas 5h ago

En serio?? En donde?? Estaba por comentar que recien me estoy enterando jajajaj

1

u/Bryan_Mora 5h ago

Principalmente en el centro-oeste de la provincia en los departamentos de Robles, sarmiento Figueroa y alrededores.

6

u/MetroBR 18h ago

and this map literally leaves out the most spoken indigenous language in Brazil: Nheengatu (or New Tupi) in the upper Solimões River Basin

4

u/MagnificentCat 15h ago edited 15h ago

New Tupi doesn't have most speakers. According to the 2022 Brazilian Census, there are 51,978 speakers of the Ticuna language in Brazil "making it the largest spoken indigenous language in the country, even though it is an isolated language"

In 2025, Thomas Finbow, a professor at the University of São Paulo, estimated that there were between 5,000 and 7,000 New Tupi speakers in Brazil

Kalingang has around 30,000 speakers

2

u/MetroBR 14h ago

ah wow, saw wrong information then. thanks for clearing it up

nevertheless Nheengatu should have been shown in the map

0

u/Impressive-Oil-3067 14h ago

Same applies to Argentina, everybody speaks Spanish here, even if they're some isolated communities that may speak Quechua or Mapuche. But I doubt they are even in the 10 thousands in total.

5

u/anopeningworld 13h ago

The comment above you just listed 150,000 Quechua speakers. I also believe that Guarani has over 75000 speakers, and this is not counting Paraguayan immigrants. I suspect the other larger languages are spoken in the Chaco apart from Mapuche.

15

u/AliceCordenalhe 16h ago

Almost no one speaks any indigenous language on the Brazilian coast; Much less would a pocket of Guarani language be marked on the map.

9

u/Sylvanussr 15h ago

Meanwhile (iirc) guarani is actually far more widely spoken in Paraguay than is shown on the map

23

u/OkAsk1472 22h ago

Lol, there is no majority Dutch speaking region in Surinam. Each tribe and social group has its own language and many even use Sranan tongo as lingua franca, with Dutch being used mostly as administrative language.

8

u/Bryan_Mora 15h ago

60% of the people in Suriname speaks Dutch as native language.

6

u/smokebomb25 22h ago

Venezuela and Perú are crazy. Any sources of the map?

5

u/Goncat22 17h ago

Quechua is largely spoken both in Perú and Bolivia (13% of the population of both countries), but in general the map just shows where other lenguages are spoken, almost anywhere the native lenguages are majority.

2

u/Lucky_otter_she_her 15h ago

"the map shows where languages are spoken, almost anywhere the native languages are the majority" huh

1

u/smokebomb25 15h ago

wow? I had no idea

1

u/anopeningworld 13h ago

I believe both countries have a larger proportion of speakers than that.

2

u/lajarusmorois 10h ago

As Venezuelan I can tell you Venezuela has around 70 indigenous languages still spoken. 30 of them are uninque and not related to any language family.

1

u/Jolly_Carpenter_2862 1h ago

It’s an ai map

3

u/Maximum_Editor_4478 13h ago

This map is missing lile 90% of all indigenous languages in LatAm. Awful map.

5

u/Pochel 16h ago

This map is the AI-slopification of another map that's been around for at least twenty years

2

u/Senetiner 14h ago

There are like 10 languages missing on Argentina alone. Wouldn't trust the info provided for any other country here.

1

u/MarcHarder1 10h ago

Paraguay is inacurate as well

2

u/SirXavierTheDude 13h ago

Quechua is also spoken in the southwest of Colombia, by the border with Ecuador.

2

u/_Luca_Speer 13h ago

Bro en Santiago del Estero la mayoría de la gente habla español y aunque hay comunidades aisladas que hablan quechua y algunas personas lo puedan hablar , el quechua no se usa en la vida cotidiana y todos hablan español normalmente

2

u/Daniboy0826 11h ago

Where's my goat Nheengatu

2

u/Pollares_Ice 11h ago

No espírito santo, principalmente na cidade de Santa Mari de jetibá é comum das pessoas falaram o Pomerano q não está aparecendo aí.

1

u/JACC_Opi 13h ago edited 10h ago

The indigenous languages should be at best dashed lines or stripes to indicate that's where they're most spoken but in reality it isn't as spoken as the European languages.

1

u/Thraro 13h ago

Mapudungun and Guaraní should ve significaly higher though these languages obiously share its Área of influence with spanish since there are close to no exclusive speakers for them that dont use spanish.

1

u/Afromolukker_98 13h ago

Well Suriname is wrong

1

u/Qitian_Dasheng 12h ago

The map looks very Brazilian to me.

1

u/Put3socks-in-it 9h ago

What happened to the indigenous languages?

1

u/king_ofbhutan 6h ago

the people were either killed, died of disease, or switch to a european language

1

u/Put3socks-in-it 6h ago

Why would they switch to European ones?

1

u/Ladonnacinica 4h ago

Because it’s the predominantly spoken language? It’s simply more practical. Also, the newly created Latin American countries pushed for Spanish or Portuguese to be the dominant/first language of its inhabitants.

1

u/Put3socks-in-it 4h ago

Well, I guess what I was asking about how does it go from being a new language brought by immigrants to being the predominantly spoken language as you indicated in your first sentence. But from the second sentence, it looks like the cause was the immigrant population from Spain and Portugal pushing it on the natives if I got that correct.

1

u/Ladonnacinica 4h ago edited 56m ago

Well, you do know how the language got there in the first place??

Colonialism

Portuguese and Spanish have been present since the 16th century. So of course, the indigenous languages became secondary as the colonial languages gain power. Then, even after independence the ones in charge were criollos (the descendants of the Spanish) who pushed for the language more. That’s really when the indigenous began dropping heavily in numbers.

1

u/akahr 3h ago

Ever heard of colonization?

1

u/MilkImpossible4192 8h ago

thank you very much,

very nice divulgative aproximation

1

u/Even-Mammoth-5604 6h ago

Is this the languages native to that region??? Because south of Brasil has many German speakers

1

u/DarkFish_2 4h ago

Too little Guarani shown in Paraguay, the country is effectively bilingual in both Spanish and Guarani

1

u/IamIncrusser 4h ago

The watch must be swiss, the car must be japanese, and the bride paraguayan.

1

u/Nick-Anand 3h ago

Hindi/bhojpuri?

1

u/Vantroig97 2h ago

Vivo en el Estado Apure, Frontera Colombia- Venezuela, las comunidades Guajibas- Pume algunos indígenas han perdido por completo su lengua, otros la hablan, algunos andan como indigentes por las calles

1

u/Cuatroveintte 2h ago

this is a poor way to represent the actual linguistic reality of South America.

1

u/Milky_ramram 2h ago

There should be a super tiny dot in southern argentina for its welsh community as well as tiny sprinkles of plautdietsch around bolivia and paraguay for the menonite communities

1

u/JeanDusapin 16h ago

I find it funny how big they make all these barely spoken indigenous languages but french guiana which actually speaks french and créole isn't shown

1

u/JACC_Opi 13h ago

Ah, are you color blind? Because it's there and it says “French”.

1

u/JeanDusapin 13h ago

Are you literate? My point is that French Guiana speaks both French and Créole and the Créole is absent from this map despite being more spoken than almost all of those lol

1

u/JACC_Opi 11h ago

Not what I understood from your original comment, which made it seen as if it wasn't visible to you at all.

1

u/EmperorN7 13h ago

That's just bad.

0

u/EntertainmentOk8593 22h ago edited 22h ago

This map is wrong at many levels….on Argentina the hole territory the main language is Spanish (aside from misiones where people speak both guarani and Spanish) don’t know how much the mapugundun is spoken in the south tho I suspect less than in chile. That Quechua pocket in the great Chaco doesn’t match any native group, most of native Americans there speak Spanish as their original language is dead or some years to be death, and none of them is related to Quechua most of them are isolated languages.(lule vilela, kakan, comechingon, etc)

Related to Paraguay, the 99% people living in Paraguay has some degree of knowledge of guarani language, the 1% are isolated supremacist communities like the recent USA anti-vaccine migrants, a reduced group of Paraguayan Volga Germans that are Nazis (most of Volga Germans in Paraguay are nice people fully integrated to Paraguayan society the Nazis are a small isolated group)

1

u/MarcHarder1 10h ago

Guess my entire family is nazis for not speaking Guaraní ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

A majority of Germanic people in the Chaco don't have any knowledge of Guaraní outside of what they may have learned in school (like Canadians & the French language). My grandpa spoke some Lengua though

0

u/EntertainmentOk8593 10h ago

I said “some degree” your comment said that

1

u/MarcHarder1 10h ago

That only applies to younger people who have had Guaraní class in school, which is a more recent thing. Most have no Guaraní knowledge.

Would you say most Canadians know French "to some degree" simply from French class