Re: Papua New Guinea gains independence (16/9/1975)

On 2024-09-16 11:15:00 +0000, Ross Clark said:

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

Most of those are unsurprising, but Cameroon and Chad? Why do they have so much language diversity? We had a student from Cameroon a few years ago. He could speak French and English, and I think he could understand Hausa, but what his home language was I don't know.
--
Athel cb