Language & words
Papua New Guinea has around 840 living languages, more than any other country.
With about ten million people, that is roughly one language for every 12,000 inhabitants. Many languages are spoken by only a few hundred people in a single valley.
Why is this true?
Rugged mountains, dense rainforest and thousands of years of settlement kept communities isolated from each other. Tok Pisin, an English-based creole, now serves as the common language.
More facts in this category
More about language & words
Language facts show how much of everyday speech is historical accident. Words that once meant the opposite, letters that vanished from the alphabet, punctuation with names almost nobody uses. Each entry explains the change that produced the oddity — a sound shift, a printing convention, a borrowing from another language — so it works as a genuine explanation and not just as a piece of trivia.