World's most linguistically diverse nation. Crystal says over 800
languages, which is in the right range.
I have to point out that it is outranked by Vanuatu in the per-capita
rankings. Vanuatu's languages are all Austronesian, whereas PNG has at
least a dozen separate families and some language isolates, so you could
say the "depth" of language diversity is greater there.
A while back I looked at the 20 nations listed on this page as having
the most languages within their borders.
http://www.vistawide.com/languages/20_countries_most_languages.htm
I also threw in the Solomon Islands, which lie between PNG and Vanuatu.
The top five (plus one) in languages per million population:
Vanuatu 575
PNG 149
(Solomon Islands 125)
Cameroon 17.5
Australia 13.8
Chad 13.5
Languages per million sq.km. area:
Vanuatu 9583
(Solomon Islands 2678)
PNG 1782
Nepal 893
Philippines 600
Cameroon 589
"Most of the languages [in PNG] have very few speakers...." says
Crystal. This is a bit misleading. I used to say that all the Pacific
island languages were small, as they were well under the mean (7 billion
people / 7000 languages = 1 million speakers for an "average" language).
But of course the distribution is logarithmic, and only a small minority
of the world's languages have more than a million speakers. The median
range of 1,000 - 100,000 represents what I'd call "typical" languages,
and lots of Pacific languages fall within that. The largest in PNG are
in the hundreds of thousands (e.g. Enga); in Vanuatu everything is on a
smaller scale and the top is around 10,000 (e.g. Lenakel).
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