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Daily Data InsightsPapua New Guinea has more living languages than any other country

Papua New Guinea has more living languages than any other country

A horizontal bar chart displaying the number of living languages spoken in various countries. The countries listed from highest to lowest number of languages are: 

1. Papua New Guinea: 840 languages
2. Indonesia: 710 languages
3. Nigeria: 530 languages
4. India: 453 languages
5. China: 306 languages
6. Mexico: 293 languages
7. Cameroon: 279 languages
8. United States: 236 languages
9. Australia: 224 languages
10. Brazil: 222 languages

The chart is titled "How many living languages are spoken in each country? 2024" and states that a living language has at least one person speaking it as their first language. Data source is cited as Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) International, 2024, with a note referencing Our World in Data.

Papua New Guinea has 840 living languages — more than any other country.

A living language is one that is spoken by at least one person as their first language. The chart shows the ten countries with the most living languages as of 2024. This data is from the Ethnologue dataset produced by the Summer Institute of Linguistics International.

There are over 7,000 living languages globally, meaning that more than 10% of the world’s living languages are spoken in Papua New Guinea.

Papua New Guinea was initially settled by humans around 50,000 years ago, allowing a long time for languages to be established. Around 3,500 years ago, people speaking a different family of languages (Austronesian) arrived and settled in Papua New Guinea, bringing additional diversity to the country.

Unlike many nations, Papua New Guinea did not experience historical events such as the establishment of an early centralized authority, which often led to the dominance of a single language. Instead, its rugged mountainous terrain isolated communities, fostering the independent development of numerous languages.

Explore the number of living languages in other countries

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