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. - ThreadSky

ourworldindata.org • 33 days ago

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.

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samsachdev.bsky.social•33 days ago

1/This is amazing. Am wasting time at work reading what defines a language. Then, I thought, if humans can invent languages as required, then why can't humans invent computer languages to translate between languages. Consider, a computer language that takes as input an English phrase, sentence, etc.

samsachdev.bsky.social•33 days ago

2/and outputs a new language. Then, this new language, when input to the computer, outputs a Spanish phrase, sentence, etc., that's a 1:1 correspondence with the English input. In other words, this new language is a transitive language between human languages. (Am sure many have thought of this.)

gs2u.bsky.social•33 days ago

Is there similar data available for each country to show what percentage of the population shares the use of at least one language?

ourworldindata.org•33 days ago

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.

goodnotbad.run.place•33 days ago

just don't tell it to russians or they'll try to invite Papua New Guinea to "defend" russian language

ourworldindata.org•33 days ago

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

ourworldindata.org•33 days ago

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.

ourworldindata.org•33 days ago

Instead, its rugged mountainous terrain isolated communities, fostering the independent development of numerous languages.

(This Daily Data Insight was written by @spoonerf.bsky.social.)

ourworldindata.org•33 days ago

Explore the number of living languages in other countries: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/living-languages

tristankatz.bsky.social•32 days ago

How can it be that there are less that 25 living languages in the UK? Or any western European country? Given the diversity of immigrants, that's surely not right.

ourworldindata.org•33 days ago

And here is the chart in Spanish, from our Spanish Instagram account (https://www.instagram.com/ourworldindata_es).

Read more about our translation efforts there: https://ourworldindata.org/instagram-in-spanish

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