Papua New Guinea has a great linguistic diversity that is due to the isolation of many of its villages by the sea and by the mountains, without external contact. Most are native languages with less than a thousand speakers.

Papua New Guinea, with a population of eight million people, is one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse places in the world. The most recent data indicate that only in its territory some 848 different languages are spoken, a fact that shows that in this country more languages are spoken than in the entire European continent.

One of the reasons that explain this great diversity is that the country is populated by a great variety of tribes. In fact, today, less than 20% of the population lives in cities.

Justification

Despite having a large territory, hundreds of islands also make up the country that have allowed many villages to remain isolated from each other over the years by the sea or the mountains, forging their own languages without external influences thanks to these natural barriers.

This is how languages with ancestral roots developed without foreign influences. The presence of weak central governments also contributed to the survival of this linguistic richness. Colonization by English speakers led to the emergence of the Tok Pisin language, which is the most widely spoken in the country.

Tok Pisin

It is a simplified form of English and one of the country’s four official languages (including hiri motu and sign language). Despite the great linguistic diversity that the country presents, the vast majority of native languages have less than 1,000 speakers. Among them one of the most spoken and popular is the enga, which has just under 200,000 speakers in the territory.

Beyond its paradisiacal landscapes, Papua New Guinea has an exceptional linguistic diversity and culture that they try to maintain as much as possible, because most of those more than 800 languages have fewer and fewer speakers.

Life expectancy

Many of the tribes in the mountainous interior have little contact with each other, let alone the outside world, and live within an unmonetized economy that depends on subsistence farming.

Life expectancy in Papua New Guinea is 63 years (men) and 68 years (women). In addition, the main religions in this place are Christianity and indigenous beliefs. A world yet to be discovered, but most importantly, a culture to be preserved for many more years.