According to data available from the last indigenous census (1992) and the 2001 general census of population and housing, in Venezuela there are at least 70 indigenous languages that are spoken, of which 40 are grouped into eight linguistic families and the other 30 do not present a recognizable relationship with other languages, and by so they are considered language isolates. Dixon and Aikhenvald considered that the number of distinguishable languages varies around 38 and the number of speakers of indigenous language is closer to 100 thousand although the number of indigenous people is greater than that figure, because many are not competent speakers of the ancestral language of their ethnic group. On the other hand, Ethnologue, whose classification does not always distinguish between dialects of the same language and different languages, distinguishes 46 linguistic varieties in Venezuela.