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Yaeyama
(Yaeyama: yaimamunii) is a language spoken by around 44,650 people in the Yaeyama Islands, south of the Miyako area of the Ryukyus. It is a Ryukyuan language, most closely related to Miyako. It can be separated into several dialect groupings, named after the islands they are found on: Ishigaki, Iriomote and Taketomi.

Yakut
Is a Turkic language with around 363,000 speakers that is spoken in the Sakha Republic in the Russian Federation. Its speakers are known as the Sakha or the Yakuts.

Yankunytjatjara
(Also Yankuntatjara, Jangkundjara, Kulpantja) is an Australian Aboriginal language. It is one of the Wati languages of the large South-West branch of the Pama-Nyungan family. It is one of the varieties of the Western Desert Language.

Yanomami
The name generally refers to a people who live in an area that spans parts of the northwest Amazon Rainforest and southern Orinoco, share the culture, and who speak Yanomaman languages, which include Yanomamö and Sanima. Traditionally, a Yanomami village is a relatively temporary wood and thatch house called a shabono. The shabono is circular in shape and surrounds a central open space. Each family has their own area within the shabono. The Yanomami are known as hunters, fishers, and horticulturists, cultivating as their main crops plantains and cassava in "gardens," areas of the forest cleared for cultivation. They do not have fully agricultural lands as some other tribes do, however.

Yanyuwa
(Also Yanyula, Anyula) language is spoken by the Yanyuwa people around the settlement of Borroloola (Yanyuwa burrulula) in the Northern Territory, Australia. Yanyuwa, like many Australian Aboriginal languages, is a complex agglutinative language whose grammar is pervaded by a set of sixteen noun classes, whose agreements are complicated and numerous. Yanyuwa is ergative. Yanyuwa is critically endangered, with just four native speakers remaining.

Yapese
Is a language spoken by 6,600 people on the island of Yap (Federated States of Micronesia). It belongs to the Austronesian languages, more specifically to the Oceanic languages. It has been suggested that Yapese may be one of the Admiralty Island languages. Written Yapese uses Latin script. The glottal stop used to be marked with an apostrophe, but that has been replaced with the letter 'q'. This explains the enormous quantity of q's in Yapese place names.

Yaqui
(Yoem Noki), or Yoeme, is a Native American language of the Uto-Aztecan family. It is spoken by about 15,000 people, mostly of the border Yaqui tribe, in the region around the Mexican state of Sonora, and by about 350 people in Arizona in the United States.

Yauma
Is spoken in Angola and Zambia in the Kwando River area.

Yavapai
Is a Native American language quite similar to Havasupai and Walapai. It is spoken by the eponymous tribe in Arizona.

Yemenite Hebrew language
Is a descendant of Biblical Hebrew traditionally used by Yemenite Jews. It is believed by some scholars that its phonology was heavily influenced by Yemeni-spoken Arabic. Yet, according to other scholars as well as Yemenite Jewish Rabbis such as Rabbi Yosef Qafah the Temani Hebrew dialect was not influenced by Yemenite Arabic, as this type of Arabic was also spoken by Yemenite Jews and is distinct from the liturgical Hebrew and the coversational Hebrew of the communities.

Yeni
Is an extinct language of Cameroon, formerly spoken around Djeni Mountain in the Nyalang area. All that remains of the language, apparently, is a song remembered by some Sandani-speakers. However, according to Bruce Connell (the first linguist to report its existence, in 1995), comparison of the song's words to neighboring languages suggests that "it was closely related to Cambap, Njerep, and Kasabe.

Yevanic
Otherwise known as Romaniote and Judeo-Greek, was the dialect of the Romaniotes, the group of Greek Jews whose existence in Greece is documented since the Hellenistic period. Its linguistic lineage stems from the Hellenistic Koine and includes Hebrew elements as well. It was mutually intelligible with Greek of the Christian population. The Romaniotes used their version of the Hebrew alphabet to write Greek and Yevanic texts.
There are no longer any native speakers of Yevanic, for the following reasons: the assimilation of the tiny Romaniote communities by the larger Ladino-speaking Sephardi Jews, the adoption of Greek, Turkish and Bulgarian through assimilation; the emigration of many of the Romaniotes to Israel and the United States; the ideology of Zionism, which favored Hebrew as the one language for all Jews.

Yi
(Also Moso, Lolo, Noso, etc.) is a family of closely related Tibeto-Burman languages spoken by the Yi people. Although linguists still use the term Lolo or Loloish, the Yi people themselves regard it as pejorative.

Yiddish
Is a Germanic language spoken by about three million people throughout the world, predominantly Ashkenazi Jews. The name Yiddish itself is Yiddish for "Jewish" (compare German jüdisch) and is likely an abbreviated rendition of yidish-taytsh (compare German jüdisch-deutsch) or "Jewish German". Its earliest historical phase (13th-14th centuries), was formerly referred to as Judeo-German. This designation was rejected by Max Weinreich who pointed out that it overlooked the fact that Yiddish from its inception was an autonomous system analogous to other Jewish languages.

Yokutsan
(Also Yokuts) is an endangered language family spoken in the interior of southern California in and around the San Joaquin valley by the Yokut tribe. The speakers of Yokutsan languages were severely affected by disease, missionaries, and the Gold Rush: most are now extinct.

Yonaguni
Is a language spoken by around 1800 people on the island of Yonaguni, in Japan, just east of Taiwan. It is a Ryukyuan language, most closely related to Yaeyama.

Yoruba
Is a dialect continuum of West Africa with over 22 million speakers. The native tongue of the Yoruba people, it is spoken, among other languages, in Nigeria, Benin, and Togo and traces of it are found among communities in Brazil and Cuba (where it is called Nago). Yoruba is an isolating, tonal language with SVO syntax. Apart from referring to the aggregate of dialects and their speakers, the term Yoruba is used for the standard, written form of the language. Yoruba is classified as a Niger-Congo language of the Yoruboid branch of Defoid, Benue-Congo.

Yucatec Maya
Is a Mayan language spoken in the Yucatán Peninsula, northern Belize and parts of Guatemala. To native speakers, it is known only as Maya - Yucatec is a tag linguists use to distinguish it from other Mayan languages (such as the Quiché language and the Lacandon language). Yucatec is an agglutinative language and so because of this many words in Yucatec can end up being very long. There are a great number of root words, prefixes, suffixes and affixes utilised in Yucatec Mayan.

Yucatec Maya Sign Language
Is used in the Yucatán region in Mexico by both hearing and deaf members of a number of traditional Mayan communities with unusually high numbers of deaf inhabitants. It is a natural complex language, which is not related to Mexican Sign Language, but may have similarities with sign languages found in nearby Guatemala. As the hearing villagers are competent in the sign language, the deaf inhabitants seem to be well integrated in the community - in contrast to the marginalisation of deaf people in the wider community. The spoken language of the community is Yucatec Maya language.

Yuchi
Is the language of the Yuchi people living in the southeastern United States, including eastern Tennessee, western Carolinas, northern Georgia and Alabama, in the period of early European colonization. However, speakers of the Yuchi language were forcibly relocated to Oklahoma in the early 1800s. Due to assimilation into Muscogee and English-speaking culture, only a few elderly speakers of the Yuchi language remain.

Yukaghir
Are a family of related languages spoken in Russia by the Yukaghir, a Mongoloid people in Siberia, living in the basin of the Kolyma River. The only two extant members are:
- Northern Yukaghir (also known as Jukagir, Odul, Tundra, Tundre, Yukagir) and
- Southern Yukaghir (also known as Jukagir, Kolym, Kolyma, Odul, Southern Yukagir, Yukagir)

Yupik
The Yupik people speak five distinct languages, depending on their location. The languages differ enough from one another that speakers of different ones cannot understand each other, although they may understand the general idea of a conversation of speakers of another of the languages. The Yupik languages are in the family of Eskimo-Aleut languages. The Aleut and Eskimo languages diverged about 2000 B.C., and the Yupik languages diverged from each other and from Inuktitut about 1000 A.D.

Yurats
Is a Samoyedic language formerly spoken in the Siberian tundra west of the Yenisei River.

Yurok
(Also Weitspekan) is a moribund Algic language. It is the traditional language of the Yurok tribe of northwestern California, USA, most of whom now speak English. The standard reference on the Yurok language is the grammar by Robins (1958).