Why Do Some Places Speak So Many Languages?

Why is it that some countries only have a single language like Portugal with Portuguese just varying in accent and some very little varying dialects while [music] others like our example for this video Papua New Guinea have hundreds or even thousands. We're not talking about dialects. These are real different languages that are very much unique. If we expand our analysis into the whole island of New Guinea instead of only Papua, we get all of the Papuan languages and that number increases even more. So, why? Why do some regions of the world foster so many unique languages while others don't? Let's find out. I think our best case study really is the one on the thumbnail, the island of New Guinea. So, let's stick with that. I want to do three things here. First, learn how many languages there are and what unites them. Why are they gathered as Papuan languages? Then, understand where they are spoken and how they differ or maybe don't differ. And three, understand through that why there are so many of them. Papua New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse country in the world and by association the New Guinea island is the most linguistically diverse island and [music] all together region in the world since it also includes some of the small surrounding islands and archipelagoes. These stretch all the way into the east and west to the Bismarck Archipelago, Bougainville, the Solomon Islands, the Alor Archipelago including even the language spoken in Timor along with Portuguese and some other islands that are part of Indonesia. Actually, there's even one Papuan language spoken within the national borders of Australia, Meriam, in the eastern Torres Strait, a remnant of pre-colonial Australia that is different to the Aboriginal language reality. There's between 800 to 1,000 languages in the region, and they can be grouped into around 60 small language families or more. It kind of depends. You're going to see a little further ahead in the video. Some of them are related, but not all. Those relationships are also often unclear. You do have many language isolates, languages that exist on their own with no connection to any other existing languages. If you want a western comparison to this, you can look at the Basque language spoken in the Basque Country in Spain. It's the only pre-Indo-European language that remains and has zero connection with any other languages spoken in Europe in modern times. The Basque Country and its historical predecessor of the Kingdom of Navarre are also somewhat geographically isolated within the Iberian Peninsula and Europe. This helps us understand why it is an isolate and gives us another hint as to why those language isolates also exist in New Guinea. But, let's not get ahead of ourselves. It's important to understand something immediately. It also gives us another hint as to why there are so many languages. Papuan languages are grouped by geography. There's not necessarily a genetic or ethnic relationship between them. They were only grouped up to differentiate the people of this region of the world between those that speak Austronesian languages and those that don't. It was a concept introduced almost 200 years ago by Sidney Herbert Ray, a British linguist and explorer of the region. In this picture, we see him precisely in the Torres Straits, that area of Australia that has a Papuan language. The comparison to the Austronesian languages is actually a perfect way to understand the difference between this family and others. Austronesian languages are genetically related in one family. They descend from a common ancestral language called Proto-Austronesian from 6,000 years ago or something. Papuan languages don't trace back to a single one. To say a language is Papuan only means that it's from the region of Oceania and it's not Austronesian. You could kind of think of it as a others category in the region's languages. They just gave it a name because they are concentrated here. Now, even if we just count the main island of New Guinea, there's about 17 million people there. 12 of them are from Papua New Guinea. The other 5 million or so are from the Indonesian controlled Western New Guinea. One could argue the whole island should be a single country and that Indonesia only has it because they inherited the entirety of the Dutch East Indie colonies, but that's a whole other topic. These 800 to 1,000 languages are kind of divided between these 17 million people. Some are spoken by hundreds, other by thousands, some by hundreds of thousands, and some by very small groups when you start including the surrounding islands. Records of this are quite old, but we do have some of them. Western Dani is the most spoken language in Indonesian Western New Guinea concentrated in the Highland Papuan region. In 1993, there were around 180,000 speakers. Ekari had 100,000 speakers in 1985 spoken mostly in Indonesian Central Papua, which is to the west of the island, but in the center of the Indonesian part. Enga is spoken by around a quarter million people mostly in the Enga province of Papua New Guinea. I think this is the most spoken language out of all of these. Huli had 150,000 native speakers in 2011 spoken in the Southern Highlands, while Melpa registered 130,000 speakers in 1991, concentrated in the small Western Highlands province of Papua New Guinea. These are just five examples that only totals to less than a million speakers, just over 5% of the island's total, but they are, along with Kuman spoken in the Chimbu province and Makasae spoken in East Timor, the only seven languages spoken by over 100,000 people. Today, for instance, is spoken by only 27,000 and Nasioi by only 20,000 in Bougainville. There's many others spoken by one or 2,000 people only and hundreds of others spoken by hundreds of speakers, if not less. By the way, Bougainville is the island of Papua New Guinea that is about to become independent. They voted to become their own country in 2019 with a 98% win. They should be independent by the end of 2027 and this language of Nasioi will become an official national language by then, too. Now, I don't think learning any of these Papuan languages is easy. It might not even be possible unless you go there, but for other languages in the world, there's a lot of ways that you can learn them. But if you're like me, then learning languages the regular way never really works out very well. I tried all of the, you know, regular apps, but you just end up learning a bunch of vocabulary words and sentences that you're never really going to use, like "The apples are on the table." So, okay, now what? But the moment it actually clicked for me was when I started using the sponsor of this video, Linguee Play. What I like about it is that it's not really an app in the traditional sense. It's almost like a streaming platform where you learn a language by watching shows and movies from that language's culture. So, instead of textbook sentences, you're learning how people from those countries actually speak. You get an idea of their slang, their jokes, accents, everything. And the best part is the tools that Lingopie offers along with the video streaming. If I'm watching a show and I don't understand something that was said, I can just click the word in the subtitles and then it automatically translates it. And then it saves that word into a review deck, so I can review and remember it later. There was this one moment when I was watching a Spanish show and I understood a joke that was made without having to click the translation, without having to pause and translate it in my head. And that's when it kind of hits you. You're not just studying anymore, you're really just understanding. And I think that's the main goal when you want to learn a language. It's the main difference. Lingopie feels like you are binge-watching your way into learning a new language. I'm not kidding when I tell you that I actually initially learned how to speak English by watching Friends DVDs with my parents, you know, almost like a decade ago. And now I'm recreating that process in a much easier and more efficient way with Lingopie for other languages. They've got thousands of movies and shows. You can find them in multiple languages like Spanish, French, Italian, and many more. It works on pretty much any device and it's really good because you merge your learning with your entertaining, so it doesn't take a big chunk out of your day that you have to dedicate to that process. It's really perfect if you have a busy routine. So, if you want to try it out, go to Lingopie through the link in the description and start watching your first show. Okay. So, now we get how many languages there are, where they are spoken, which are the ones that are most spoken, and why they were grouped up as a whole even though there's no connection between all of them. But, which connections do exist? Well, it depends who you ask. I mean, literally, it depends which research you look at. There's been around seven major sets of attempts at a large-scale genealogical classification of Papuan languages. The most widely used is the one made by Stephen Wurm in 1975. He identified 16 language families to group up the hundreds. Some families are smaller groups of language isolates that have no connection between them either. Malcolm Ross in 2005 changed it to 30 families, separating the isolates by location. Then Søren Wichmann in 2013 determined there should be in fact 109 and nine families. While Bill Palmer in 2018 proposed 43 families and 37 isolates. It's honestly quite confusing to look into, but I think there's one common element that we can take from all of their researches. The largest family is the Trans-New Guinea one. Wurm first included up to 600 languages in it. Following researchers reduced it a bit. You can see it in this great map. In blue are the solid members of the family. In a lighter or grayer blue are tentative members whose belonging to the family is more questionable. In gray are other Papuan language families or isolates unrelated to these ones entirely. And in orange are the Austronesian languages, also unrelated. So, okay, at least we understand that within the whole of the Papuan languages there are some connections between the majority of them. You can then break down the family into smaller branches or smaller families, I guess, that join specific languages that are even more similar to each other. Think of it like this. You can group up all Romance languages into a family that includes Romanian, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. Then you can create a subfamily of, let's say, Iberian languages with Portuguese and Spanish that are even closer together. This is that just that at a bigger scale. It's the sixth largest language family in in world and definitely the most geographically concentrated. For reference, Indo-European is the third, and it's spoken basically all over Europe and more. It's also the sixth largest in number of languages that are part of it, but it's only spoken by 3 million people. If you rank language families by number of speakers, it drops down to 26th. This again shows you how few people speak each language. The reason why they're grouped up in this large family while others are left out is essentially a shared inherited structure in the way they write and speak. The strongest evidence comes from their use of personal pronouns. I is usually some variation of na or ni, while you is usually ga or gi. They also have similar grammatical structures organizing their sentences in a subject-object-verb order. They use a lot of suffixes rather than prefixes, and they even have shared vocabulary that seems to be inherited from a common ancestral language in the past. Outside of this large family, you have other smaller ones or isolates that don't share those structures and words. They are all extraordinarily unique with habits that no other language seems to use. This Reddit user on r/languages reading losses explains a few, and I found it really fascinating. Kata, for instance, has a unique term to refer to exactly three people. Kuwapi has semantically complex suffixes that combine person, number, and tense. Yau has an unusually large tone system. Lot and this is my favorite, distinguishes between edible and non-edible possessives, while Wano and Nukna have super complicated numeral systems that literally count fingers and toes. This is the most recent research map by Timothy Usher and Edgar Sutter in 2024. It reduces the reach of the Trans-New Guinea family a bit to mostly the southwest of the island with everything else being mostly separate from it like some of these examples that I just mentioned. Okay, now wait, let me go through my checklist again. We know how many languages, where they are spoken, why they're grouped up all together despite being different and which connections do exist between some of them and their subfamilies. So, the last question we have to answer and I guess the main one of the video is why are there so many of them? The Trans-New Guinea family groups up many of them, but recent research points to it being less than half of the Papuan languages. So, you still have 400 to 700 other languages that are pretty unique. Why? There's a lot of reasons for New Guinea's language diversity. The most obvious is geography. First, you can immediately cut off all the smaller surrounding islands and understand their uniqueness. They're islands. They're geographically and physically separated from other populations by water. Sure, the water was crossable and the few common languages between them prove that, but it also justifies the existence of isolates or separate unique families in some of them. This concept of geographic isolation can also be applied within the main island of New Guinea. When you look at a terrain map of the island, you immediately see how the island is first of all split into two by huge mountain range that stretches from west to east. Smaller mountain ranges further separate the far west, far east, and north within themselves. Not only do the populations on each side of these mountains become isolated, but the populations that live within the mountains from mountain to mountain do too. Furthermore, the island is completely filled with forests and jungles. These are also separated and categorized differently. You have mountain rainforests, lowland rainforests, swamps, mangroves. All of these repeat and deepen the process that the mountains did. They separate groups of population between them and within themselves. River systems also didn't help. I mean, they're really dense and common throughout the island. So, the first explanation is simple. In two words, geographical isolation. Through mountains, through forests, and rivers, it leads to isolated groups of people that develop their own languages over time. Communities couldn't physically communicate with each other. Another factor is long-term isolation from the outside world. New Guinea has been inhabited for about 40,000 years. That's much longer than most language families in Europe or Asia. I mean, those places had people that far back too, but not the same ones that are speaking the languages today. This is relevant because languages naturally change throughout time. I mean, even modern English is similar to Old English, but not the same. And when you put together thousands of years with geographical isolation, the result is languages that become mutually unintelligible, even if they did have a common super old ancestor from wherever these people initially came from before arriving in New Guinea. There was also a lack of large unifying states throughout time. In many parts of the world with linguistic [music] diversity, there eventually came an empire that imposed their culture and language on the rest. The Romans did it in Europe with Latin, at least in the south, and the Chinese did the same in much of East Asia. Here that didn't happen. Austronesian people did arrive at the island, but stayed mostly on the coasts, barely interacting with and not replacing the natives. Asian powers didn't expand there, and only by the time of European colonization did the Germans, English, and Dutch arrive. Not staying for long enough to have an impact there. Both Europeans and Austronesians didn't homogenize or replace the islands languages. They just added more layers of diversity. And finally, there's the aspect of social identity. Language on the island is strongly tied to group identity. Small communities sometimes chose and continue to choose to maintain linguistic differences on purpose. It helps them distinguish who belongs in their group from who doesn't. If you have the same thought process I did, you're probably thinking, "Okay, but then how does the country function?" We saw how Papua New Guinea alone has about 800 languages. How can a country work like that? Do they do it like Belgium where each sign is written in Flemish and Walloonian, but they have a 800 long list instead? Well, of course not. As [music] time has gone on and modern times arrived, connections began being established between parts of the island. Transportation between regions is easier, and wireless contact also became possible via first radio, then phone, and now the internet. It seems today the island has three main languages. Tok Pisin is the actual national language. It's spoken throughout the whole country. Motu is also spoken in the Central Province and capital city of Port Moresby, although it's kind of declining. And then Kuman spoken in the Simbu Province, which is a local language, but one of the biggest. English has also become official, but it's less widely spoken. Not many people are fluent. But essentially, most people are now multilingual, speaking their local language, then Tok Pisin, and sometimes English. Tok Pisin is essentially an English-based creole with local influences that everybody ended up learning. It's used when communicating between different groups, as well as in media and politics. This is mostly exclusive to Papua New Guinea as a country, though. In the east part of the New Guinea island, in the west, the provinces controlled by Indonesia have Indonesian as the lingua franca instead of Tok Pisin. There's also a stronger replacement pressure as Indonesia wants to assert their own language to reinforce their political rule over the region. So, essentially, that's why New Guinea has so many languages and also why the same doesn't happen in other places of the world. Nobody has New Guinea's unique reality. [music] They've been both isolated from the rest of the world as a whole for tens of thousands of years, but also been isolated from each other internally due to the island's very specific geography full of mountains, rivers, forests, and jungles. And also their culture of specific group identity. Even with modern technology and political union to some extent, it remains the most linguistically diverse region in the world. Some languages have gone extinct. Others are on the way. We'll have to wait and see what the future holds if Tok Pisin takes over and the others just die out, but I for one hope that the diversity continues. It's a fun exception to a less and less linguistically unique world. Hey guys, if you want to watch some Patreon exclusive videos, you should support me on Patreon. You also get them here on YouTube if you choose to become a member. Sometimes that's more convenient. You get one exclusive video a month and some other benefits. Plus, you support me directly and allow me to continue making videos. So, if that seems interesting to you, make sure to do it. If not, that is totally fine. Thank you for watching either way.