Papua New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse country in the world, with an estimated 840 languages still spoken today – over 10% of the world’s total. Even more remarkable is that this linguistic wealth exists within a population of just 10 million.
Officially, Papua New Guinea has three national languages: Hiri Motu, Tok Pisin and English.
English is spoken as the main language, of course, due to its colonial history. In the 19th century, the country was annexed as a protectorate of the British Empire, and later had an Australian administration, before gaining independence from Australia in 1975.
Tok Pisin (literally “bird talk”) is a creole language based on English that developed during the British Empire. It was developed by various groups of workers from Melanesia, Malaysia, and China who came to the country in the 19th century to work primarily on sugarcane plantations. Although heavily influenced by English, Tokio incorporates vocabulary and structures from a variety of local and foreign languages.
Hiri Motu is a pidgin variety of Motu, an Austronesian language originally spoken in the area around the capital, Port Moresby. Somewhat related to Tokio Pisin, it is less influenced by English and more closely adheres to its Austronesian roots, with a simplified grammar and vocabulary to facilitate communication between speakers of different local languages.
In addition to these three, there are hundreds of other indigenous languages in Papua New Guinea, reflecting the country’s enormous ethnic and cultural diversity.
It is made up of hundreds of islands in the southwest Pacific Ocean, north of Australia, and its rugged terrain of mountains and dense jungles has historically limited local migration and cultural mixing, which has favored the formation of isolated indigenous groups. These groups have remained distinct and have not homogenized even with the advent of agriculture around 10,000 years ago.
Although there have been clashes with the British Empire and German colonization, the land’s remoteness and harsh geography have also allowed certain groups to resist foreign influence and maintain their centuries-old identity.
Scientists note that this unique history is clearly reflected in the population’s deep genetic diversity, as shown by a 2017 study.
“Our study revealed that the genetic differences between the groups of people there are generally very strong, often much stronger than those between the main populations within the whole of Europe or the whole of East Asia,” said Anders Bergström, first author of the 2017 paper from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, in a statement published at the time. “We found a striking difference between the groups that live in the highlands and those in the lowlands, with the genetic separation between them dating back 10,000-20,000 years. This makes sense from a cultural point of view, as the groups in the highlands have historically kept apart, but such a strong genetic barrier between otherwise geographically close groups is still very unusual and curious,” added Professor Stephen Oppenheimer, second author of the paper from the Centre for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford.
Illustrative Photo by Elias Alex: https://www.pexels.com/photo/elderly-woman-waving-her-hand-10404220/
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First published in this link of The European Times.
