Papua New Guinea has more living languages than any other country

Papua New Guinea has 840 living languages — more than any other country.

A living language is one that is spoken by at least one person as their first language. The chart shows the ten countries with the most living languages as of 2024. This data is from the Ethnologue dataset produced by the Summer Institute of Linguistics International.

There are over 7,000 living languages globally, meaning that more than 10% of the world’s living languages are spoken in Papua New Guinea.

Papua New Guinea was initially settled by humans around 50,000 years ago, allowing a long time for languages to be established. Around 3,500 years ago, people speaking a different family of languages (Austronesian) arrived and settled in Papua New Guinea, bringing additional diversity to the country.

Unlike many nations, Papua New Guinea did not experience historical events such as the establishment of an early centralized authority, which often led to the dominance of a single language. Instead, its rugged mountainous terrain isolated communities, fostering the independent development of numerous languages.

Explore the number of living languages in other countries →

Where this page came from

This page was imported from Our World in Data. “Papua New Guinea has more living languages than any other country” by Fiona Spooner, published by Our World in Data under CC BY 4.0. Changed here: set as a page, its interactive charts shown as pictures. Data from third parties keeps its own licence.

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