If you are travelling to Papua New Guinea, you don't need to pack a phrasebook, you need to bring an entire library. With 841 living tongues and a colourful creole lingua franca, this Pacific nation is the undisputed world champion of linguistic diversity.
From Pii in the mist-cloaked highlands to Toaripi on the shores of the gleaming Coral Sea, Papua New Guinea is a linguist's paradise with one in 10 of the world's languages found here.
The number of speakers of individual languages can range from a handful of people in the jungle -- not much more than an extended family -- to millions spread across provinces and terrains.
Experts point to the country's relatively weak central government, deep valleys, almost impenetrable vegetation and roughly 600 islands to explain why a country of eight million people and smaller than Spain has such a bounty of languages, when 46 million Spaniards -- for all practical purposes -- make do with a dozen or so.
Many of these diverse tongues have developed undisturbed over tens of thousands of years, making Papua New Guinea something of a linguistic Galapagos. To get by day-to-day, Papua New Guineans typically speak three to five languages, and understand many more dialects.
But ironically they can sometimes struggle to render a simple sentence in one language into their mother tongue -- particularly when discussing numbers over 10 or when rural-based languages are deployed to describe life in the big city.
When asked to say "there are more than 800 languages in Papua New Guinea" in Vula'a -- which has a couple of thousand speakers in the central province -- Port Moresby office worker Sonia Pegi has to call her dad just to make sure she has it right
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