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Papua New Guinea, a sovereign state in Oceania, is the most linguistically diverse country in the world. [5] According to Ethnologue, there are 839 living languages spoken in the country. [6] In 2006, Papua New Guinea Prime Minister Sir Michael Somare stated that "Papua New Guinea has 832 living languages (languages, not dialects)." [7] [8]
Principal language families of the world (and in some cases geographic groups of families). For greater detail, see Distribution of languages in the world. This is a list of languages by total number of speakers. It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect.
Country or territory Number of living languages Number of speakers Established Immigrant Total Percent [note 1]Total Mean Median Papua New Guinea 840 0 840 11.81 ...
The languages that are neither Austronesian nor Australian are considered Papuan languages; this is a geographical rather than linguistic demarcation. [1] Of the Papuan languages, the largest linguistic grouping is considered to be Trans-New Guinean , with between 300 and 500 languages likely belonging to the group in addition to a huge variety ...
They speak mainly Huli and Tok Pisin; many also speak some of the surrounding languages, and some also speak English. They are one of the largest cultural groups in Papua New Guinea, numbering over 250,000 people (based on the population of Hela of 249,449 at the time of the 2011 national census).
The indigenous peoples of Western New Guinea in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, commonly called Papuans, [2] are Melanesians.There is genetic evidence for two major historical lineages in New Guinea and neighboring islands: a first wave from the Malay Archipelago perhaps 50,000 years ago when New Guinea and Australia were a single landmass called Sahul and, much later, a wave of Austronesian ...
The "Papuan languages" are a strictly geographical grouping, and does not imply a genetic relationship. The concept of Papuan (non-Austronesian) speaking Melanesians as distinct from Austronesian-speaking Melanesians was first suggested and named by Sidney Herbert Ray in 1892. [2] In accordance with William A. Foley (1986):
This is a list of languages by number of native speakers.. Current distribution of human language families. All such rankings of human languages ranked by their number of native speakers should be used with caution, because it is not possible to devise a coherent set of linguistic criteria for distinguishing languages in a dialect continuum. [1]