Languages of South America: The Most Spoken and Indigenous South American Languages (2026)

South America's linguistic landscape is among the most complex on Earth. The continent was home to an estimated 1,500 languages when European colonizers arrived in the late 15th century. Today, according to Ethnologue, there are approximately 448 languages in South America — and that figure includes both surviving indigenous tongues and immigrant languages brought over centuries of migration. That means over 1,000 languages have been lost in roughly 600 years, a rate of erasure that has prompted global action including the UN's International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022–2032).

South America has more language families (37) than either North America (13) or Central America (6). Most of the continent's population communicates in Spanish or Portuguese, legacies of Iberian colonization. But beyond those two colonial languages lie hundreds of indigenous tongues, several immigrant languages from 19th- and 20th-century European and Asian migration waves, and a handful of official languages with significant speaker communities.

This guide covers the most spoken languages of South America, the most important indigenous languages, and the immigrant language communities that make the continent's linguistic picture more complex than a simple Spanish-Portuguese divide.

Table of Contents

• What are the most spoken languages of South America?
• Which South American countries speak Spanish?
• Where is Portuguese spoken in South America?
• What is Quechua and how many people speak it?
• What is Guarani and why is it unique in South America?
• What is Aymara and where is it spoken?
• What other indigenous languages are spoken in South America?
• What immigrant languages are spoken in South America?
• Which South American languages are endangered?
• What does South America's linguistic diversity mean for translation?
• FAQs

What are the most spoken languages of South America?

The most spoken languages in South America, when ranked by total speaker numbers, are Spanish, Portuguese, Quechua, Guarani, and Aymara. The balance between Spanish and Portuguese is closer than most people expect.

According to Rosetta Stone's 2024 Spanish language data, roughly 210 million South Americans speak Spanish. Portuguese follows at approximately 206 million speakers, according to Babbel's languages of South America research, with Brazil alone accounting for over 205 million of those speakers. The difference is marginal enough that Wikipedia's Languages of South America article notes that Portuguese is the most spoken language within South America as a continent, while Spanish is the most spoken across the Americas as a whole.

After Spanish and Portuguese, the picture becomes distinctly indigenous. Quechua has between 8 and 13 million speakers depending on dialect classification, making it the most spoken indigenous language in South America by a substantial margin. Guarani follows with approximately 6.5 million speakers, and Aymara with approximately 2.5 million.

Which South American countries speak Spanish?

Nine of South America's twelve sovereign nations use Spanish as their official or de facto national language. According to Rosetta Stone, the total South American Spanish-speaking population is slightly less than half of the continent's total population of approximately 436 million — reflecting the enormous demographic weight of Portuguese-speaking Brazil.

The countries with the largest Spanish-speaking populations in South America are:

Spanish arrived in South America in the late 15th century, with the first permanent Spanish-speaking settlement at Cumaná, Venezuela, established in 1501. The language spread through conquest, colonial administration, and Catholic missionary activity — and, as in much of the world, the suppression of indigenous languages was a deliberate tool of colonial control.

Despite its shared origins, Spanish in South America is far from uniform. Argentine Spanish is characterized by a distinctive Italian-influenced intonation and a "zh" pronunciation of "ll" and "y" sounds. Colombian Spanish, particularly the Bogotá variety, is widely considered among the clearest and most neutral-sounding in Latin America. Bolivian Spanish carries heavy Quechua influence in vocabulary and grammatical structure. These regional varieties matter for any organization producing Spanish-language content for specific South American markets: a text calibrated for one country's audience may read as foreign in another.

Where is Portuguese spoken in South America?

Brazil is the only South American country where Portuguese is an official language, and it accounts for nearly half of the continent's entire population. Brazil's population stands at approximately 215 million, with Portuguese spoken as a first language by around 99.5% of Brazilians, making it one of the world's most concentrated single-language nations by sheer size.

According to Babbel's South American language data, approximately 206 million Portuguese speakers reside in South America, with Brazil home to the vast majority. Smaller Portuguese-speaking communities exist in neighboring Venezuela (approximately 254,000), Paraguay (212,000), and Uruguay (24,000).

Brazilian Portuguese is meaningfully distinct from European Portuguese in pronunciation, vocabulary, and some grammatical constructions. For organizations targeting Brazilian audiences, content translated from European Portuguese (or from a generic "Portuguese" standard) will read as noticeably foreign. Tomedes provides professional Brazilian Portuguese translation services with native Brazilian linguists who understand the market, culture, and communication norms specific to Brazil.

In addition to standard Portuguese, Brazil is home to a number of Portuguese-based creoles and heritage languages. Italian and German dialects including Talian, East Pomeranian, and Hunsrik have co-official status alongside Portuguese in about a dozen Brazilian municipalities and are mandatory subjects in schools in additional areas, according to Wikipedia's Languages of South America.

What is Quechua and how many people speak it?

Quechua is the most spoken indigenous language in South America and in the Americas as a whole. It is a family of closely related languages (not a single uniform tongue) and the varieties spoken in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia differ significantly enough that mutual intelligibility between them is limited in some cases.

Indiana University's Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies estimates over 13 million Quechua speakers in the Andean republics, spanning southern Colombia and Ecuador through Peru and Bolivia and into northwestern Argentina and northern Chile. Other estimates range from 7 to 10 million depending on which dialects and varieties are counted and the reliability of census data in rural Andean communities, where under-reporting is a well-documented issue.

Quechua's origins are debated among linguists, but it is thought by some scholars to have originated as early as 2,600 BC. The Inca Empire then spread it aggressively as an administrative language across the Andes in the 15th century, which is why speakers are found across such a vast geographic area today. Quechua is recognized as an official language in Peru and Bolivia, and as an official language for intercultural relations in Ecuador.

Despite its millions of speakers, Quechua faces significant pressure from Spanish. Education in most Andean countries is delivered primarily in Spanish, and Quechua is strongly associated with rural and indigenous identity — social factors that lead many speakers, particularly in urban areas, to avoid using it publicly. Bolivia and Ecuador have made meaningful advances in bilingual education and official language promotion in recent decades, but the threat of intergenerational language loss remains acute.

Quechua's influence on Latin American Spanish is extensive. Words including papa (potato), chuchaqui (hangover, in Ecuador), and soroche (altitude sickness) entered Spanish through Quechua contact, and Bolivian Spanish in particular retains a significant number of Quechua vocabulary items even among non-Quechua speakers.

What is Guarani and why is it unique in South America?

Guarani is spoken primarily in Paraguay and parts of Argentina, Bolivia, and Brazil, with approximately 6.5 million total speakers. What makes Guarani exceptional among South American indigenous languages is its status as a genuinely co-equal official language in Paraguay alongside Spanish.

Paraguay is the only country in the Americas where a majority of the population speaks an indigenous language as a primary means of daily communication. According to Rosetta Stone's Spanish-speaking countries data, approximately 46% of Paraguayans speak both Spanish and Guarani, and around half the population in rural Paraguay is monolingual in Guarani. The language permeates Paraguayan culture, politics, and everyday speech to an extent unparalleled by any other indigenous language in the region.

Guarani belongs to the Tupi-Guarani language family, which according to Ethnologue is one of the largest in South America with 76 languages. The Tupi branch (related to Guarani) was also historically significant as a colonial lingua franca along the Brazilian coast, though it has since largely given way to Portuguese.

What is Aymara and where is it spoken?

Aymara is native to the Bolivian Andes and Peru, with approximately 2.5 million speakers making it the third most spoken indigenous language in South America. It holds co-official status alongside Spanish in Bolivia and Peru, and is recognized as a minority language in parts of northern Chile.

Like Quechua, Aymara is under sustained pressure from Spanish dominance in education and public life. However, Peru has seen a modest increase in Aymara speaker numbers in recent decades (from approximately 440,000 native speakers in 1993 to around 450,000 by 2017) suggesting that preservation efforts are having some effect in certain communities. Bolivia has similarly invested in indigenous language promotion, particularly after the 2009 constitution formally recognized 36 indigenous languages as co-official alongside Spanish.

Aymara shares notable structural features with Quechua, and the two languages have historically been grouped together under the proposed "Quechumaran" family. This classification is largely rejected by specialists today, who consider the similarities a product of intense and long-term contact between the two groups rather than shared ancestry.

What other indigenous languages are spoken in South America?

Beyond Quechua, Guarani, and Aymara, dozens of other indigenous languages retain living speaker communities across South America. Some are spoken by tens of thousands; others by just a handful of elders in remote communities.

Mapudungun (Mapuche) is spoken in Chile and Argentina and is the most significant indigenous language of the Southern Cone region. Also called Mapuche, it has around 260,000 native speakers, predominantly in southern Chile and the Argentine provinces of Neuquén and Río Negro. Despite political rhetoric in Chile about language preservation, education in Mapudungun remains limited and speaker numbers continue to decline.

Wayuunaiki (Wayuu / Guajiro) is spoken by the Wayuu people of Venezuela and Colombia, with around 420,000 native speakers. Preservation efforts have included the creation of a Wayuunaiki–Spanish illustrated dictionary and a dictionary of technology terms, reflecting a broader recognition that indigenous languages must adapt to the modern lexical environment to remain viable.

Arawakan languages constitute one of South America's largest indigenous language families, according to Ethnologue, with 64 languages. Arawakan languages are spoken across a wide geographic arc from the Caribbean coast down through the Amazon basin and into the Bolivian lowlands.

Embera is a vulnerable language spoken in Colombia and Panama by around 70,000 speakers. It is not classified as endangered by UNESCO standards but faces the same pressures of urban migration and education in Spanish that affect most South American indigenous languages.

Páez (Nasa Yuwe) is spoken in Colombia by approximately 60,000 native speakers. Like Wayuunaiki, it has benefited from community-led documentation and educational efforts in recent years.

Kuna is spoken in Colombia and Panama by approximately 61,000 native speakers, many of whom are bilingual in Spanish. UNESCO classifies Kuna as severely endangered, reflecting the demographic pressures facing many smaller indigenous communities.

What immigrant languages are spoken in South America?

Centuries of European and Asian migration to South America have created communities of speakers of languages far beyond Spanish and Portuguese. According to Babbel's South American language research, the major immigrant language communities are:

German has approximately 2 million speakers in South America, primarily in Brazil (1.5 million), Argentina (400,000), Ecuador (112,000), Paraguay (58,000), Uruguay (27,000), and Chile (20,000). German-speaking communities in southern Brazil's Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina states have maintained distinct German dialect varieties (including Hunsrik and East Pomeranian) for over a century, and these dialects have co-official status in several municipalities.

Italian has approximately 1.5 million speakers, almost all of them in Argentina, with smaller communities in Brazil and Uruguay. Italian immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was so significant in Argentina that Italian influence on Argentine Spanish pronunciation is still clearly audible.

English is spoken by approximately 5.4 million people across South America, with the largest concentrations in Argentina (2.8 million) and Colombia (1.9 million). English is the official language of Guyana (the only sovereign South American state with English as its national language) and of the Falkland Islands.

Arabic has approximately 1.1 million speakers in South America, primarily in Argentina (around 1 million), with smaller communities in Venezuela and Suriname. South America hosts one of the largest Arab diaspora populations outside the Middle East, the result of Lebanese and Syrian immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Japanese communities exist in Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia. Brazil holds the largest Japanese community outside Japan, the result of large-scale Japanese immigration in the early 20th century.

Dutch is the official language of Suriname and is spoken in neighboring French Guiana alongside French. Suriname also has Sranan Tongo, an English-based creole, as a widely used lingua franca alongside Dutch.

Ukrainian has approximately 527,000 speakers in South America, almost entirely in Brazil (500,000), where Ukrainian immigration in the early 20th century established lasting communities in the southern states.

Which South American languages are endangered?

The scale of language loss in South America over the past 600 years is staggering. When European sailors arrived, an estimated 1,500 languages were spoken across the continent. According to Ethnologue, the current total is under 450, including immigrant languages. That represents over 1,000 indigenous languages lost in a little over six centuries.

According to UNESCO, language endangerment results from external forces including military, economic, religious, cultural, and educational subjugation, as well as internal forces such as communities' own negative attitudes toward their languages. Many indigenous peoples in South America have come to associate their languages with social disadvantage, leading to voluntary language shift toward Spanish or Portuguese.

Geography has preserved some languages that might otherwise have been lost. Jungles, mountain ranges, and wide rivers kept communities isolated for centuries, allowing languages to survive that would otherwise have been absorbed into larger colonial-language communities. But as roads, telecommunications, and urban migration reach previously isolated communities, this natural protection is disappearing.

The UN International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022–2032) was declared by the UN General Assembly specifically to draw global attention to the crisis of indigenous language loss and to mobilize action by governments, institutions, and communities. According to the UN Division for Inclusive Social Development, optimistic estimates suggest at least 50% of today's spoken languages will be extinct or seriously endangered by 2100. More pessimistic projections place that figure at 90–95%.

Several organizations are working to document and preserve South American indigenous languages before they are lost. The Catalogue of Endangered Languages at the University of Hawaii at Manoa maintains ongoing records of language vitality for hundreds of South American languages. Quechua has been listed on UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, a designation that has helped draw attention and resources to preservation efforts.

What does South America's linguistic diversity mean for translation?

South America's linguistic complexity has direct implications for any business, organization, or institution communicating across the continent.

Spanish is not uniform. Colombian, Argentine, Venezuelan, Peruvian, and Bolivian Spanish differ in vocabulary, accent, formality conventions, and cultural reference points. For marketing content, legal documents, educational materials, or any audience-specific communication, specifying the target Spanish variety and country is as important as specifying the language itself.

Brazilian Portuguese is distinct from European Portuguese. Organizations that serve Brazil should never assume that content translated from European Portuguese or from a generic Portuguese standard will resonate with Brazilian readers. The two varieties differ significantly in vocabulary, register, and cultural context.

Indigenous language requirements exist in specific contexts. Organizations working with public-sector clients, NGOs, or community-facing programs in Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Paraguay, or indigenous territories throughout the continent may be required (or culturally expected) to provide content in Quechua, Aymara, Guarani, or other recognized indigenous languages. Bolivia's 2009 constitution formally recognizes 36 indigenous languages as co-official.

Immigrant language communities represent significant market segments. German-speaking communities in southern Brazil, Arabic-speaking communities in Argentina, and Japanese-speaking communities in São Paulo are not fringe audiences. For businesses in specific industries or regions, translation into these community languages can be strategically important.

Tomedes provides professional Spanish translation services covering all major South American Spanish varieties, as well as Brazilian Portuguese translation with native linguists and subject-matter expertise across legal, medical, technical, and marketing content. Every project is managed by a dedicated project manager and is backed by ISO 17100:2015 certification and a 1-Year Quality Guarantee.

FAQs

Q: What is the most spoken language in South America?
A: The most spoken languages in South America are Spanish and Portuguese, with total speaker numbers that are very close. Rosetta Stone's 2024 data places Spanish speakers at approximately 210 million and Portuguese speakers at around 206 million. Wikipedia's Languages of South America article notes that Portuguese is the most spoken language within the South American continent, while Spanish is the most spoken across the Americas as a whole. After these two colonial languages, Quechua is the most spoken indigenous language, with between 8 and 13 million speakers depending on the method of classification.

Q: How many languages are spoken in South America?
A: According to Ethnologue, approximately 448 languages are spoken in South America today. This figure includes indigenous languages, colonial European languages (Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, Dutch), and immigrant languages brought by 19th- and 20th-century migration. South America has 37 distinct language families, more than either North or Central America.

Q: What is the most spoken indigenous language in South America?
A: Quechua is the most spoken indigenous language in South America and in the Americas as a whole. Speaker estimates range from approximately 7 million to over 13 million, depending on which dialects and varieties are included and the reliability of census data. Quechua is co-official in Peru and Bolivia, and has official status for intercultural relations in Ecuador. It is spoken across Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and smaller communities in Argentina, Chile, and Colombia.

Q: Is Guarani an official language in Paraguay?
A: Yes. Guarani is a co-official language of Paraguay alongside Spanish. Paraguay is the only country in the Americas where the majority of the population speaks an indigenous language as part of daily communication. Approximately 46% of Paraguayans speak both Spanish and Guarani, with around half the rural population monolingual in Guarani.

Q: Are there languages other than Spanish and Portuguese in South America?
A: Yes, significantly so. Beyond the two colonial languages, South America has a wide range of living indigenous languages including Quechua, Guarani, Aymara, Mapudungun, Wayuunaiki, and hundreds more. English is the official language of Guyana. Dutch is the official language of Suriname. French is official in French Guiana. Immigrant communities speak German, Italian, Arabic, Japanese, Ukrainian, and Chinese across the continent, particularly in Argentina, Brazil, and Suriname.

Q: How many South American languages are endangered?
A: The scale of language loss is significant. Of the estimated 1,500 languages spoken in South America before European colonization, Ethnologue records fewer than 450 languages today. Hundreds of surviving indigenous languages are classed as endangered, severely endangered, or critically endangered under UNESCO's classification framework. The UN International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022–2032) was declared specifically to mobilize action on the global crisis of indigenous language loss.