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From: Athel Cornish-Bowden <me@yahoo.com>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Papua New Guinea gains independence (16/9/1975)
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2024 09:14:56 +0200
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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