Papua New Guinea: Earth's Most Linguistically Diverse Country
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Papua New Guinea has over 800 distinct languages — approximately 12 percent of all languages on earth — in a country of 10 million people. The linguistic diversity is a consequence of geography: the island's mountain ranges isolated communities for tens of thousands of years, allowing languages to diverge without contact. Some language communities number only a few hundred people. The diversity is so complete that in some areas, neighbouring villages whose territory shares a border speak mutually incomprehensible languages.
The Highlands culture of PNG's central ranges produces the most spectacular gathering in the Pacific: the Sing-Sing festival, where communities from across the highlands converge in face paint, feathers, shells, and traditional dress that can take days to assemble, to dance together in competitive display. The Goroka Show, held annually, brings groups from dozens of different cultural traditions to one field. The result is simultaneously a cultural exchange, a competition, and an assertion of identity — each group performing the distinctive marks of who they are in front of everyone else.
PNG contains the third-largest tropical rainforest in the world, largely intact, and extraordinary biodiversity including birds-of-paradise — 38 of the 42 species — whose elaborate plumage and courtship displays represent some of the most extreme examples of sexual selection in the animal kingdom. The male Raggiana bird-of-paradise, with its cascade of orange plumes, appears on the national flag and the national currency. Its feathers have been worn by Highlanders in ceremony for thousands of years.
