Papua New Guinea (PNG) has about 800 + languages that i think make up 25% of the worlds languages. However, it is spoken by about 100,000 people or 1-2% of the population. In many cases Usher and Suter have created new names for the member families to reflect their geographic location. I've made it safely to my 134th country - PAPUA NEW GUINEA! Note that while this classification may be more reliable than past attempts, it is based on a single parameter, pronouns, and therefore must remain tentative. Amid such a multiplicity of tongues, Tok Pisin serves as an effective lingua franca. Although there has been relatively little study of these languages compared with the Austronesian family, there have been three preliminary attempts at large-scale genealogical classification, by Joseph Greenberg, Stephen Wurm, and Malcolm Ross. The westernmost language, Tambora in Sumbawa, is extinct. These were formerly also the staple foods for Highlanders, who now mostly rely on sweet potatoes known as kau kau. Papua New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse country in the world with over 850 living languages, and amazingly, the nation accounts for almost an eighth of the world's total languages. The majority of the Papuan languages are spoken on the island of New Guinea, with a number spoken in the Bismarck Archipelago, Bougainville Island and the Solomon Islands to the east, and in Halmahera, Timor and the Alor archipelago to the west. [7] Besides Trans–New Guinea and families possibly belonging in TNG (see), he accepted the proposals for. Approximately another one-fifth are Roman Catholics. One Papuan language, Meriam, is spoken within the national borders of Australia, in the eastern Torres Strait. Common Phrases What is your name? According to Ross (see below), the main problem with Wurm's classification is that he did not take contact-induced change into account. READ PAPER. These languages all have SVO word order, with the exception of the language isolate Kuot, which has VSO word order. In the colonial era copra was the premier crop in lowland areas, but now only small amounts are produced, together with some rubber in the southern region. By signing up for this email, you are agreeing to news, offers, and information from Encyclopaedia Britannica. Throughout much of the Highlands, carefully tended gardens dominate the landscape; some are arrayed in checkerboard patterns defined by drainage ditches, and others are circular mounds built on compost to warm and enrich the soil. In general, the Central–Eastern Malayo-Polynesian languages are marked by a significant historical Papuan influence, lexically, grammatically, and phonologically, and this is responsible for much of the diversity of the Austronesian language family. In addition, poorly attested Karami remains unclassified. It has been suggested that the families that appear when comparing pronouns may be due to pronoun borrowing rather than to genealogical relatedness. Joseph Greenberg proposed an Indo-Pacific phylum containing the (Northern) Andamanese languages, all Papuan languages, and the Tasmanian languages, but not the Australian Aboriginal languages. English is mainly spoken by migrants and expatriates working in the country. Malcolm Ross re-evaluated Wurm's proposal on purely lexical grounds. Tweet. In 2006, the Prime Minister of the country declared that there are 832 living languages in Papua New Guinea. The Papuan Languages of New Guinea Papuan speakers, who constitute the great majority of the population, live mainly in the interior. [4], The Great Andamanese languages may be related to some western Papuan languages, but are not themselves covered by the term Papuan.[2]. Nonetheless, Ross believes that he has been able to validate much of Wurm's classification, albeit with revisions to correct for Wurm's partially typological approach. Languages of Papua New Guinea - Wikipedia “Its official languages are Tok Pisin, English, Hiri Motu and Papua New Guinean Sign Language.” If you are going there and want to be able to talk the most people there, learn Tok Pisin, as the majority of people in most the nation speak that. 9 families have been broken up into separate groups in Wichmann's (2013) classification, which are: An automated computational analysis (ASJP 4) by Müller, Velupillai, Wichmann et al. Despite the official languages, the other languages were not nullified. 851 indigenous languages are spoken in the country. However, the nation is considered as the most linguistically diverse country in the … It is so diverse that each province has about two to three different languages. Both phenomena greatly increase the possibility of chance resemblances, especially when they are not confirmed by lexical similarities. With an average of only 7,000 speakers per language, Papua New Guinea has a greater density of languages than any other nation on earth except Vanuatu. Despite the greatly diminished importance of plantations and the relocation of most of the airstrips out of the towns, those origins helped determine the existing urban layout. do not address the more tentative families that Usher proposes, such as Northwest New Guinea. What is the world’s largest archipelago? There is over 850 languages in Papua New Guinea! 304 Papua New Guinea is a country of a little more than three million inhabitants in which it is said that 750 distinct languages are spoken. Church near Lorengau, Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. [5], Two of Wurm's isolates have since been linked as the. Papua New Guinea has 839 languages -- the highest number of languages spoken as a first language in a single country. The popular language is spoken by over 200,000 people. Four languages are officially recognized in the constitution. Papua New Guinea occupies the eastern part of the world's second largest island and is prey to volcanic activity, earthquakes and tidal waves. Trans-New Guinea languages and Austrone-sian languages spoken in Madang Province, Papua New Guinea.1) Though Trans-New Guinea languages and Austronesian languages are grammatically and lexically different from each other (Foley 2000), this study tries to find common aspectual features by contrasting these sample languages (Lynch 1998: 62-64, Rapid population growth has created difficulties in providing basic health and education services. [1] It is a strictly geographical grouping, and does not imply a genetic relationship. Austronesian speakers generally inhabit the coastal regions and offshore islands, including the Trobriands and Buka. All other Papuan languages are right-headed. Pidgin English and Hiri Motu are more commonly used (an estimated 742 other languages and dialects are also spoken). Other linguists, including William A. Foley, have suggested that many of Wurm's phyla are based on areal features and structural similarities, and accept only the lowest levels of his classification, most of which he inherited from prior taxonomies. - Yu whosait?My name is (Joe) - Nem bilong mi (Joe)Thank you very much - tenk yu tru(e)No thank you - sori nogutHow are you? Introduction. The capital of Papua New Guinea is Port Moresby. As of 2020, the following families are identified:[19]. Müller, André, Viveka Velupillai, Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Eric W. Holman, Sebastian Sauppe, Pamela Brown, Harald Hammarström, Oleg Belyaev, Johann-Mattis List, Dik Bakker, Dmitri Egorov, Matthias Urban, Robert Mailhammer, Matthew S. Dryer, Evgenia Korovina, David Beck, Helen Geyer, Pattie Epps, Anthony Grant, and Pilar Valenzuela. Joseph Greenberg proposed that the Andamanese languages (or at least the Great Andamanese languages) off the coast of Burma are related to the Papuan or West Papuan languages. It has been suggested that these may have originally been non-Austronesian languages that have borrowed nearly all of their vocabulary from neighboring Austronesian languages, but no connection with the Papuan languages of Timor has been found. Almost all commercial crops are exported, although the domestic vegetable market is growing rapidly. The majority of Papua New Guinea’s people are at least nominally Christian. The approximately 550 non-Austronesian languages have small speech communities, the largest being the Engan, Melpa, and Kuman speakers in the Highlands, each with more than 100,000 speakers. English was introduced into the country as part of the Indo-European language by the Australians who colonized it for some time. [20] He believed that it was naïve to expect to find a single Papuan or Australian language family when New Guinea and Australia had been a single landmass for most of their human history, having been separated by the Torres Strait only 8000 years ago, and that a deep reconstruction would likely include languages from both. The English language has e… >>Motu spoken in Papua region >>820 indigenous languages (over 1/10th of the world's total) There are upwards of 750 separate languages spoken throughout Papua New Guinea. [5], The West Papuan, Lower Mamberamo, and most Torricelli languages are all left-headed, as well as the languages of New Britain and New Ireland. When it became independent in 1949, the government of Papua New Guinea chose three languages for official use – English, Tok Pisin (creole) and Hiri Motu (simplified form of the Austronesian language, Motu). Despite only having four official languages, Papua New Guinea has an astonishing 832 native languages spoken within its borders. Despite its small size, it is the most linguistically diverse country on the planet. English is one of the official languages spoken in the country. Factbook > Countries > Papua New Guinea > Demographics Languages: Tok Pisin (official), English (official), Hiri Motu (official), some 839 indigenous languages spoken (about 12% of the world's total); many languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers The island of New Guinea is one of the most bio-culturally diverse regions of the globe [].Contained within New Guinea’s 768,000 km 2 are more than 900 languages divided into at least 23 different language families [2, 3].In linguistic terms, New Guinea is therefore at least six times more diverse than Europe in classical times []. - yu orait ? About one-third of the population is under 15 years of age. It is based on very preliminary work, much of it typological, and Wurm himself has stated that he doesn't expect it to hold up well to scrutiny. (you alright) I’m fine - mi orait tasolHow much is that? Wurm also suggested the Sepik–Ramu languages have similarities with the Australian languages, but believed this may be due to a substratum effect,[6] but nevertheless believed that the Australian languages represent a linguistic group that existed in New Guinea before the arrival of the Papuan languages (which he believed arrived in at least two different groups). Besides the Austronesian languages, there are some 800 languages divided into perhaps sixty small language families, with unclear relationships to each other or to any other languages, plus many language isolates. It has more than twice the number of languages spoken across Europe. A total of about 6.9 million people worldwide speak Papuan languages as their mother tongue. Those thinly populated areas in turn give way to sago swamps along the courses of the great Ramu and Sepik rivers. After 1975 smallholders increasingly took over the bulk of export crop production, replacing foreign-owned plantations. The approximately 550 non-Austronesian languages have small speech communities, the largest being the Engan, Melpa, and Kuman speakers in the Highlands, each with more than 100,000 speakers. The major exception has been the cultivation of oil palm in West New Britain (on previously little-used volcanic soils) and on the eastern mainland, boosted by foreign investment. However, he considered this not evidence of a connection between (Great) Andamanese and Trans–New Guinea, but of a substratum from an earlier migration to New Guinea from the west. The various high-level families may represent distinct migrations into New Guinea, presumably from the west. Unemployment and underemployment have exacerbated the problems of poverty, crime, and ethnic tensions, especially in urban areas. Ring in the new year with a Britannica Membership. [22], Tonal Papuan languages include the Sko, Lepki, Kaure, Kembra, Lakes Plain, and Keuw languages. The Reef Islands – Santa Cruz languages of Wurm's East Papuan phylum were a potential 24th family, but subsequent work has shown them to be highly divergent Austronesian languages as well. The official languages of Papua New Guinea are Tok Pisin, English and Hiri Motu. [8] Some of the groups could turn out to be related to each other, but Wichmann (2013) lists them as separate groups pending further research. [2] Since perhaps only a quarter of Papuan languages have been studied in detail, linguists' understanding of the relationships between them will continue to be revised. Papua New Guinea. Papua New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse country in the world. 1. The north coast and northeastern archipelagoes are generally well-populated, despite the hazards of volcanic eruptions, frequent earth tremors, and, rarely, tsunamis. However, more recently Foley has accepted the broad outline if not the details of Wurm's classification, as he and Ross have substantiated a large portion of Wurm's Trans–New Guinea phylum. This was the scheme used by Ethnologue prior to Ross's classification (below). [17], Timothy Usher and Edgar Suter, with the advice of Papuan researchers such as William Croft, Matthew Dryer, John Lynch, Andrew Pawley, and Malcolm Ross,[18] have reconstructed low-level constituents of Papuan language families to verify which purported members truly belong to them. Seventh-day Adventism is increasing in popularity, and there are also small numbers of Bahāʾīs and Muslims. The largest family posited for the Papuan region is the Trans–New Guinea phylum, consisting of the majority of Papuan languages and running mainly along the highlands of New Guinea. English is taught in many schools and is spoken mostly by the educated, as well as being used in bureaucratic processes such as government, trade and commerce. The Highlands valleys are densely settled, whether in villages or scattered hamlets. While Pawley & Hammarström's internal classification of Trans-New Guinea largely resembles a composite of Usher's and Ross' classifications, Palmer et al. The island of Karkar and the Gazelle Peninsula of New Britain are centres of particularly dense population. To the east, Terei (27,000 reported 2003) and Naasioi (20,000 reported 2007) are spoken on Bougainville. Greenberg also suggested a connection to the Tasmanian languages. Rural settlement patterns are extremely varied. In addition to the official languages, there are more than 800 distinct indigenous languages belonging to two radically different language groups—Austronesian, to which the local languages classified as Melanesian belong, and non-Austronesian, or Papuan. 37 Full PDFs related to this paper. After independence, Papua New Guinea adopted three official languages. However, Ross argues that Papuan languages have closed-class pronoun systems, which are resistant to borrowing, and in any case that the massive number of languages with similar pronouns in a family like Trans–New Guinea preclude borrowing as an explanation. Much of their classification is accepted by Glottolog (though the names are not; Glottolog invents its own names). (See Trans–New Guinea languages.) The official language is English, which is widely used in business and government circles. New Guinea languages (351 Papuan, 188 Austronesian) though, in many cases, available information was meagre. One fifth of all the world's languages are to be In many, for example, the words for numbers Foley summarized the state of the literature. The Papuan languages are the non-Austronesian and non-Australian languages spoken on the western Pacific island of New Guinea, and neighbouring islands, by around 4 million people. Forestry was a controversial industry, with logging companies developing connections with the political elite, and it was marked by corrupt practices including improperly issued licenses, mislabeled species, transfer pricing manipulation (the practice of hiding the real value of transactions—e.g., by undervaluing exports—in order to maximize profits), tax avoidance, environmental damage, and lack of reforestation. High-quality Arabica coffee is grown throughout the Highlands, mostly by smallholders; Robusta coffee is grown on the north coast and cacao in the islands. Agricultural production, most of it from subsistence farming, accounts for about one-third of the country’s gross domestic product. However, Dixon later abandoned his proto-Australian proposal,[21] and Foley's ideas need to be re-evaluated in light of recent research. (Ross argues that open-class pronoun systems, where borrowings are common, are found in hierarchical cultures such as those of Southeast Asia and Japan, where pronouns indicate details of relationship and social status rather than simply being grammatical pro-forms as they are in the more egalitarian New Guinea societies.). The concept of Papuan peoples as distinct from Austronesian-speaking Melanesians was first suggested and named by Sidney Herbert Ray in 1892. According to the Ethnologue website, there are approximately 6,912 known living languages in the world today. More than two-fifths of the population is Protestant; Lutherans make up the largest portion of those, and there are some Anglicans and a growing number of Pentecostals. What are the islands of the Maldives made of? In the archipelagoes of the north and northeast, yams, taro, and bananas are grown as staple foods. Bill Palmer et al. The last 48 hours here in PNG have been nothing short of incredible. Papuan speakers, who constitute the great majority of the population, live mainly in the interior. That is, he looked at shared vocabulary, and especially shared idiosyncrasies analogous to English I and me vs. German ich and mich. 2. There are 840 living languages in Papua New Guinea, although 37 of those are close to extinction In most everyday contexts the most widely spoken language is Tok Pisin (“Pidgin Language”; also called Melanesian Pidgin or Neo-Melanesian), a creole combining grammatical elements of indigenous languages, some German, and, increasingly, English. Papua New Guinea is by far the largest and the most populated country in the Pacific. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries the birth rate greatly exceeded the world average, while the death rate was moderately high and falling. Ross also found that the Lower Mamberamo languages (or at least the Warembori language—he had insufficient data on Pauwi) are Austronesian languages that have been heavily transformed by contact with Papuan languages, much as the Takia language has. The production of plantation crops has suffered from declining terms of trade and was mostly stagnant from the 1980s. [22], Cover term for several language families spoken in New Guinea and neighboring areas, Papuan families proposed by Wurm (1975) (with approximate numbers of languages), Papuan families other than TNG accepted by Foley (2003), Papuan families proposed by Wichmann (2013), Papuan families proposed by Palmer (2018). Note that some of these automatically generated groupings are due to chance resemblances. Papua New Guinea is a country located to the north of Australian. It is distinct from the Trans–New Guinea phylum of the classifications below. [12] A total of 80 independent groups are recognized. (2013)[11] found lexical similarities among the following language groups. Similarly, several groups that do have substantial basic vocabulary in common with Trans–New Guinea languages are excluded from the phylum because they do not resemble it grammatically. Many of these languages are spoken only by a very small number of … There are languages that are spoken by thousands of people while others only have dozens of speakers. Tok Pisin, a creole, is the second; Hiri Motu, a simplified version of … Stephen Wurm stated that the lexical similarities between Great Andamanese and the West Papuan and Timor–Alor families "are quite striking and amount to virtual formal identity [...] in a number of instances". However, because of his more stringent criteria, he was not able to find enough data to classify all Papuan languages, especially many isolates that have no close relatives to aid in their classification. It is a multilingual nation with over 840 languages spoken, with twelve of them lacking many speakers. With a share of around 78%, it is most widespread in Papua New Guinea. Tok is spoken by roughly 12.5% of the country as a fluent language, but up to 5 million people (62.5%) use the language … Although pronouns are conservative elements in a language, they are both short and utilise a reduced set of the language's phonemic inventory. English is the first. For example, several of the main branches of his Trans–New Guinea phylum have no vocabulary in common with other Trans–New Guinea languages, and were classified as Trans–New Guinea because they are similar grammatically. Tiny Papua New Guinea is all of 462,840 square kilometres in size, about as big as the state of California. The small urban population lives for the most part in towns whose original location was determined either by access to a good harbour for early colonial planters or, in the interior, by the availability of level land sufficient for an airstrip. Speakers were allowed to use their own languages. These include Western Dani (180,000 in 1993) and Ekari (100,000 reported 1985) in the western (Indonesian) highlands, and Enga (230,000 in 2000), Huli (150,000 reported 2011), and Melpa (130,000 reported 1991) in the eastern (PNG) highlands. - Wanem nem bilong yu?Who are you? In the north the intensive cultivation of fertile soils gives way to swidden (slash-and-burn) cultivation of taro and yams in the forests of the foothills. Such diversity makes it a linguist's playground! Unlock this profile with an Essentials plan.. See the details on every language spoken in Papua New Guinea, plus: Profiles for every other country in the world; 7,464 profiles covering every language … Papua New Guinea’s rate of population growth tends to be high and life expectancy somewhat low, relative to other countries in the region. Despite the apparent inroads made by introduced religions, much of the population also maintains traditional religious beliefs, and rituals of magic, spells, and sorcery are still widely practiced. Ross has proposed 23 Papuan language families and 9–13 isolates. Central–Eastern Malayo-Polynesian languages, East Cenderawasih (Geelvink Bay) languages, languages of the East New Guinea Highlands, "Explaining the Linguistic Diversity of Sahul Using Population Models", Distant Language Relationship: The Current Perspective, ASJP World Language Trees of Lexical Similarity: Version 4 (October 2013), Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, TransNewGuinea.org - database of the languages of New Guinea, 2003 bibliography of languages (Papuan and Austronesian) of Indonesian Papua, Summer Institute of Linguistics site on languages (Papuan and Austronesian) of Papua New Guinea, Map of Papuan languages (formerly known as the East Papuan family) of island Melanesia, Dryer's Papuan Language Families and Genera, Endangered Languages of the Pacific Region, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Papuan_languages&oldid=998544225, Short description is different from Wikidata, Wikipedia articles with SUDOC identifiers, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, There is a cluster of languages in West Papua between the upper, This page was last edited on 5 January 2021, at 21:41. 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