Our planet is a home for billions of people who speak thousands of different languages. However, there is only one country in the world where people speak 840 languages \u200b\u200b- it is considered a wide variety of linguistic all over the world, writes iflscience.
We are talking about Papua-New Guinea-today they still speak about 840 languages \u200b\u200bhere-this is more than 10% of the total number of languages \u200b\u200bexisting all over the world. No less curious is that with such a wealth of languages \u200b\u200bthe population of the country is only 10 million people.
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Officially in Papua-New Gvinya there are only three national languages:.
Researchers note that English has become national because of the country's colonial history. Papua New Guinea was attached as a protectorate of the British Empire in the 19th century, and later had an Australian administration before independence in 1975.
Tok-Pisin (translated " Studies have shown that it was created by various groups of workers from Melanesia, Malaysia and China, who came here in the 19th century to work for the most part on sugarcane plantations. Despite the strong influence of the English language, the current science includes vocabulary and structures from a mixture of indigenous and foreign languages.
Hiri-Motu is a Pidzhin Variant Motu, the Austronesian language, originally widespread in the area surrounding the capital of Port Morsby. It is somewhat related to the current, but is less affected by English.
Scientists also found that in addition to three official languages \u200b\u200bin Papua-New Guinea, there are hundreds of other local languages-their number is due to huge ethnic and cultural diversity.
Papua New Guinea consists of hundreds of islands laid down on the southwestern part of the Pacific Ocean, north of Australia. Her crossed terrain with mountains and dense jungle historically limited local migration and cultural mixing, contributing to the formation of isolated indigenous groups. In simple words, these groups remained separate even with the advent of agriculture about 10,000 years ago.
Researchers note that the unique history of the country is clearly reflected in the deep genetic diversity of the population. For example, in 2017, Anders Bergstrom, researcher and colleagues found that the genetic differences between groups of people in Papua-New Guinea, are usually stronger than between basic populations throughout Europe or East Asia.
Previously, the focus wrote about which of all the languages \u200b\u200bof the world the fastest.