Which Country Is The Most Linguistically Diverse? It Speaks 840 Languages

Officially speaking, Papua New Guinea has three national languages: Hiri Motu, Tok Pisin, and English. 

English is spoken as a primary language in Papua New Guinea due to its colonial history. The country was annexed as a protectorate of the British Empire in the 19th century and later had an Australian administration before gaining independence in 1975.

Tok Pisin (literally, “bird talk”) is an English-based Creole language that developed under the British Empire. It was crafted by diverse groups of laborers from Melanesia, Malaysia, and China who came to the country during the 19th century to work primarily on the sugarcane plantations. While strongly influenced primarily by English, Tok Pisin incorporates vocabulary and structures from a medley of Indigenous and foreign languages.

Hiri Motu is a pidgin variety of Motu, an Austronesian language originally spoken in the area surrounding the capital of Port Moresby. Somewhat related to Tok Pisin, it is less influenced by English and holds onto more of its Austronesian roots, with simplified grammar and vocabulary to make it easy for communication between speakers of different native languages.

Beyond the three official languages, Papua New Guinea has hundreds of native languages owing to its immense ethnic and cultural diversity. 

The country is made up of hundreds of islands found in the southwestern Pacific, north of Australia. Its rugged terrain of mountains and dense jungle has historically restricted local migration and cultural blending, fostering the formation of isolated Indigenous groups. As a result, these groups remained distinct and did not homogenize, even with the advent of agriculture around 10,000 years ago.

Even though it had its run-ins with the British Empire and German colonization, the land’s remoteness and harsh geography also allowed certain groups to resist foreign influence and retain their age-old identities. 

Scientists have noted that this unique history is clearly reflected in the deep genetic diversity of the population, as shown by a study in 2017.

“Our study revealed that the genetic differences between groups of people there are generally very strong, often much stronger even than between major populations within all of Europe or all of East Asia,” Anders Bergström, first author of the 2017 paper from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, said in a statement published at the time. 

“We found a striking difference between the groups of people who live in the mountainous highlands and those in the lowlands, with genetic separation dating back 10,000-20,000 years between the two. This makes sense culturally, as the highland groups historically have kept to themselves, but such a strong genetic barrier between otherwise geographically close groups is still very unusual and fascinating,” added Professor Stephen J. Oppenheimer, second author of the paper from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford.