Extinct Tambora and the East Papuan languages have not been addressed, except to identify Yele as an Austronesian language. It was once a British colony, but became independent n 1975. At times logs have accounted for one-tenth of the value of national exports, but that proportion fell by about half during the Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s and only recovered slowly in the first decade of the 21st century. do not address the more tentative families that Usher proposes, such as Northwest New Guinea. The great majority of the country’s population lives in rural areas. The only Papuan languages with official recognition are those of East Timor. Languages reassigned to the Austronesian family: Søren Wichmann (2013) accepts the following 109 groups as coherent Papuan families, based on computational analyses performed by the Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP) combined with Harald Hammarström's (2012) classification. This was the scheme used by Ethnologue prior to Ross's classification (below). The majority of Papua New Guinea’s people are at least nominally Christian. Those thinly populated areas in turn give way to sago swamps along the courses of the great Ramu and Sepik rivers. Pidgin English and Hiri Motu are more commonly used (an estimated 742 other languages and dialects are also spoken). The production of plantation crops has suffered from declining terms of trade and was mostly stagnant from the 1980s. Papua New Guinea occupies the eastern part of the world's second largest island and is prey to volcanic activity, earthquakes and tidal waves. 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. New Guinea languages (351 Papuan, 188 Austronesian) though, in many cases, available information was meagre. 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. Rapid population growth has created difficulties in providing basic health and education services. 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. (See Trans–New Guinea languages.) Introduction. READ PAPER. 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. [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). - 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? What are the islands of the Maldives made of? Austronesian speakers generally inhabit the coastal regions and offshore islands, including the Trobriands and Buka. He classed the vast majority as ‘cyclic’. The popular language is spoken by over 200,000 people. A total of about 6.9 million people worldwide speak Papuan languages as their mother tongue. But some of them don’t have native speakers anymore while others are quickly losing speakers. 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. However, it is spoken by about 100,000 people or 1-2% of the population. [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. Language-in-education policies in Papua New Guinea (PNG) are possibly the most interesting and best model for the world to follow. (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.). 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. English is the first. The island of Karkar and the Gazelle Peninsula of New Britain are centres of particularly dense population. 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. "[13][14][15][16], Papuan independent language families (43 families), Papuan isolates and unclassified languages (37 total), Glottolog 4.0 (2019), based partly on Usher, recognizes 70 independent families and 55 isolates. Papuan speakers, who constitute the great majority of the population, live mainly in the interior. There are some 200 related Austronesian languages. 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. Also, he shows that the two cases of alleged pronoun borrowing in New Guinea are simple coincidence, explainable as regular developments from the protolanguages of the families in question: as earlier forms of the languages are reconstructed, their pronouns become less similar, not more. Rural settlement patterns are extremely varied. 37 Full PDFs related to this paper. By signing up for this email, you are agreeing to news, offers, and information from Encyclopaedia Britannica. The official languages of the country all reflect its colonial history. 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 … In the slightly more elevated areas away from the main rivers there are extensive areas of poor grassland with a high water table that are used for swidden cultivation and hunting. 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. All other Papuan languages are right-headed. Foley summarized the state of the literature. It has been suggested that the families that appear when comparing pronouns may be due to pronoun borrowing rather than to genealogical relatedness. The Highlands valleys are densely settled, whether in villages or scattered hamlets. There is over 850 languages in Papua New Guinea! 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. One Papuan language, Meriam, is spoken within the national borders of Australia, in the eastern Torres Strait. 2013. Forest exploitation, dominated by foreign-owned logging companies, has been extensive, particularly along the north coast, in parts of the southern region, and on New Britain and New Ireland. Greenberg also suggested a connection to the Tasmanian languages. What is the world’s largest archipelago? To the east, Terei (27,000 reported 2003) and Naasioi (20,000 reported 2007) are spoken on Bougainville. One fifth of all the world's languages are to be Statistical analyses designed to pick up signals too faint to be detected by the comparative method, though of disputed validity, suggest five major Papuan stocks (roughly Trans–New Guinea, West, North, East, and South Papuan languages);[3] long-range comparison has also suggested connections between selected languages, but again the methodology is not orthodox in historical linguistics. Common Phrases What is your name? 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. Approximately another one-fifth are Roman Catholics. The most widely used classification of Papuan languages is that of Wurm, listed below with the approximate number of languages in each family in parentheses. 2. 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. 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. William A. Foley (1986) noted lexical similarities between R. M. W. Dixon's 1980 reconstruction of proto-Australian and the languages of the East New Guinea Highlands. The coherence of the South Bird's Head, East Bird's Head, Pauwasi, Kwomtari, and Central Solomons families are uncertain, and hence are marked below as "tentative. Sort out the facts about islands across the globe. - em hamas? and since Wurm's time another isolate and two languages belonging to a new family have been discovered. Speakers were allowed to use their own languages. According to Ross (see below), the main problem with Wurm's classification is that he did not take contact-induced change into account. In many, for example, the words for numbers However, there are also many Austronesian languages that are grammatically similar to Trans–New Guinea languages due to the influence of contact and bilingualism. 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. Papuan speakers, who constitute the great majority of the population, live mainly in the interior. 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. With a share of around 78%, it is most widespread in Papua New Guinea. 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. 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. Church near Lorengau, Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. English is mainly spoken by migrants and expatriates working in the country. Many of these languages are spoken only by a very small number of … 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. 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. English is also the main language in the education system. Tok Pisin, a creole, is the second; Hiri Motu, a simplified version of … After 1975 smallholders increasingly took over the bulk of export crop production, replacing foreign-owned plantations. [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. 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. Papua New Guinea has more languages than any other country, with over 820 indigenous languages, representing 12% of the world's total, but most have fewer than 1,000 speakers. (2013)[11] found lexical similarities among the following language groups. - Wanem nem bilong yu?Who are you? These were formerly also the staple foods for Highlanders, who now mostly rely on sweet potatoes known as kau kau. Bill Palmer et al. Ring in the new year with a Britannica Membership. 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 (PNG) has about 800 + languages that i think make up 25% of the worlds languages. However, the nation is considered as the most linguistically diverse country in the … 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. >>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. 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). That is, he looked at shared vocabulary, and especially shared idiosyncrasies analogous to English I and me vs. German ich and mich. Hiri Motu is a simplified trading language originally used by the people who lived around what is now Port Moresby when it came under that name in 1884. The southern New Guinea plains are only sparsely populated by relatively mobile sago gatherers. Papua New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse country in the world. Papua New Guinea’s rate of population growth tends to be high and life expectancy somewhat low, relative to other countries in the region. [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. Unemployment and underemployment have exacerbated the problems of poverty, crime, and ethnic tensions, especially in urban areas. 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. According to the Ethnologue website, there are approximately 6,912 known living languages in the world today. Note that some of these automatically generated groupings are due to chance resemblances. Very few linguists accept his grouping. 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 []. The Lingua Franca in this country is Pidgin( tok-Pisin) which contains many words from different languages, especially English and German, the languages of the colonial powers that reigned in this part of the world. (you alright) I’m fine - mi orait tasolHow much is that? [5], Two of Wurm's isolates have since been linked as the. The north coast and northeastern archipelagoes are generally well-populated, despite the hazards of volcanic eruptions, frequent earth tremors, and, rarely, tsunamis. 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. After independence, Papua New Guinea adopted three official languages. 1. Papua New Guinea has over 850 languages, which makes it the most linguistically diverse country on Earth. Most Papuan languages are spoken by hundreds to thousands of people; the most populous are found in the New Guinea highlands, where a few exceed a hundred thousand. Tuna fisheries have great potential and foreign-owned canneries have expanded, but licenses have been sold cheaply and fishing zones monitored poorly. 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. 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 … Ethnologue (2009) largely follows Ross. 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. [22], Tonal Papuan languages include the Sko, Lepki, Kaure, Kembra, Lakes Plain, and Keuw languages. See language lists, maps, statistics, and more. As of 2020, the following families are identified:[19]. Papua New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse place on our planet. [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. There are a lot of languages spoken here because of the cultural diversity. 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. (2018) propose 43 independent families and 37 language isolates in the Papuasphere, comprising a total of 862 languages. There are 840 living languages in Papua New Guinea, although 37 of those are close to extinction Four languages are officially recognized in the constitution. 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. 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. The westernmost language, Tambora in Sumbawa, is extinct. 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. 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. Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox. There are languages that are spoken by thousands of people while others only have dozens of speakers. Sweet potato farming, south-central Highlands, Papua New Guinea. New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse region in the world. English is one of the official languages spoken in the country. The concept of Papuan peoples as distinct from Austronesian-speaking Melanesians was first suggested and named by Sidney Herbert Ray in 1892. Papua New Guinea is known for its biodiversity, cultures, and languages. Papua New Guinea (PNG) across the border has more than 800 indigenous languages which is more than one tenth of the world total. While Pawley & Hammarström's internal classification of Trans-New Guinea largely resembles a composite of Usher's and Ross' classifications, Palmer et al. Papua New Guinea is a country located to the north of Australian. The poor state of documentation of Papuan languages restricts this approach largely to pronouns. It is a multilingual nation with over 840 languages spoken, with twelve of them lacking many speakers. English is the main language of government and commerce. Almost all commercial crops are exported, although the domestic vegetable market is growing rapidly. They are Tok Pisin, English, Hiri Motu, and Papua New Guinean Sign Language. Both phenomena greatly increase the possibility of chance resemblances, especially when they are not confirmed by lexical similarities. 851 indigenous languages are spoken in the country. 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. Agricultural production, most of it from subsistence farming, accounts for about one-third of the country’s gross domestic product. [1] It is a strictly geographical grouping, and does not imply a genetic relationship. Papuan languages speaking countries Papuan languages is no official language in any country, but is spoken as mother tongue in 2 countries by a minor part of the population. 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. 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. Papua New Guinea. The capital of Papua New Guinea is Port Moresby. English was introduced into the country as part of the Indo-European language by the Australians who colonized it for some time. 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. These languages all have SVO word order, with the exception of the language isolate Kuot, which has VSO word order. In addition, poorly attested Karami remains unclassified. [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. However, Dixon later abandoned his proto-Australian proposal,[21] and Foley's ideas need to be re-evaluated in light of recent research. Papua New Guinea has 839 languages -- the highest number of languages spoken as a first language in a single country. Such diversity makes it a linguist's playground! Malcolm Ross re-evaluated Wurm's proposal on purely lexical grounds. 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. [4], The Great Andamanese languages may be related to some western Papuan languages, but are not themselves covered by the term Papuan.[2]. 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. Wurm believed the Papuan languages arrived in several waves of migration with some of the earlier languages (perhaps including the Sepik–Ramu languages) being related to the Australian languages,[5][6] a later migration bringing the West Papuan, Torricelli and the East Papuan languages[5] and a third wave bringing the most recent pre-Austronesian migration, the Trans–New Guinea family. In the archipelagoes of the north and northeast, yams, taro, and bananas are grown as staple foods. 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 Most of the government communications and publications are often made in English. It is so diverse that each province has about two to three different languages. 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. Despite only having four official languages, Papua New Guinea has an astonishing 832 native languages spoken within its borders. Amid such a multiplicity of tongues, Tok Pisin serves as an effective lingua franca. [7] Besides Trans–New Guinea and families possibly belonging in TNG (see), he accepted the proposals for. 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". 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. However, the Tasmanian peoples were isolated for perhaps 10,000 years, genocide wiped out their languages before much was recorded of them, and few linguists expect that they will ever be linked to another language family. It has more than twice the number of languages spoken across Europe. Port Moresby and Lae, on the Huon Gulf, are the largest cities. 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). Much of their classification is accepted by Glottolog (though the names are not; Glottolog invents its own names). Tweet. Despite the official languages, the other languages were not nullified. Several languages of Flores, Sumba, and other islands of eastern Indonesia are classified as Austronesian but have large numbers of non-Austronesian words in their basic vocabulary and non-Austronesian grammatical features. I've made it safely to my 134th country - PAPUA NEW GUINEA! 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. Ross has proposed 23 Papuan language families and 9–13 isolates. The official languages of Papua New Guinea are Tok Pisin, English and Hiri Motu. Seventh-day Adventism is increasing in popularity, and there are also small numbers of Bahāʾīs and Muslims. Foley (1986) divides Papuan languages into over sixty small language families, plus a number of isolates. 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,