Papua New Guinea gains independence (16/9/1975)

[Ross Clark]

World's most linguistically diverse nation. Crystal says over 800
languages, which is in the right range.
I have to point out that it is outranked by Vanuatu in the per-capita
rankings. Vanuatu's languages are all Austronesian, whereas PNG has at
least a dozen separate families and some language isolates, so you could
say the "depth" of language diversity is greater there.

A while back I looked at the 20 nations listed on this page as having
the most languages within their borders.

http://www.vistawide.com/languages/20_countries_most_languages.htm

I also threw in the Solomon Islands, which lie between PNG and Vanuatu.

The top five (plus one) in languages per million population:

Vanuatu 575
PNG 149
(Solomon Islands 125)
Cameroon 17.5
Australia 13.8
Chad 13.5

Languages per million sq.km. area:

Vanuatu 9583
(Solomon Islands 2678)
PNG 1782
Nepal 893
Philippines 600
Cameroon 589


"Most of the languages [in PNG] have very few speakers...." says
Crystal. This is a bit misleading. I used to say that all the Pacific
island languages were small, as they were well under the mean (7 billion
people / 7000 languages = 1 million speakers for an "average" language).
But of course the distribution is logarithmic, and only a small minority
of the world's languages have more than a million speakers. The median
range of 1,000 - 100,000 represents what I'd call "typical" languages,
and lots of Pacific languages fall within that. The largest in PNG are
in the hundreds of thousands (e.g. Enga); in Vanuatu everything is on a
smaller scale and the top is around 10,000 (e.g. Lenakel).

[Athel Cornish-Bowden]

Post by Ross Clark
World's most linguistically diverse nation. Crystal says over 800
languages, which is in the right range.
I have to point out that it is outranked by Vanuatu in the per-capita
rankings. Vanuatu's languages are all Austronesian, whereas PNG has at
least a dozen separate families and some language isolates, so you
could say the "depth" of language diversity is greater there.
A while back I looked at the 20 nations listed on this page as having
the most languages within their borders.
http://www.vistawide.com/languages/20_countries_most_languages.htm
I also threw in the Solomon Islands, which lie between PNG and Vanuatu.
Vanuatu 575
PNG 149
(Solomon Islands 125)
Cameroon 17.5
Australia 13.8
Chad 13.5

Most of those are unsurprising, but Cameroon and Chad? Why do they have
so much language diversity? We had a student from Cameroon a few years
ago. He could speak French and English, and I think he could understand
Hausa, but what his home language was I don't know.