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| Papua New Guinea is a linguist's paradise with one in 10 of the world's languages found here |
If you are travelling to Papua New Guinea, you don't need to pack a phrasebook, you need to bring an entire library. With 841 living tongues and a colourful creole lingua franca, this Pacific nation is the undisputed world champion of linguistic diversity.
From Pii in
the mist-cloaked highlands to Toaripi on the shores of the gleaming Coral Sea,
Papua New Guinea is a linguist's paradise with one in 10 of the world's
languages found here.
The number
of speakers of individual languages can range from a handful of people in the
jungle -- not much more than an extended family -- to millions spread across
provinces and terrains.
Experts
point to the country's relatively weak central government, deep valleys, almost
impenetrable vegetation and roughly 600 islands to explain why a country of
eight million people and smaller than Spain has such a bounty of languages,
when 46 million Spaniards -- for all practical purposes -- make do with a dozen
or so.
Many of
these diverse tongues have developed undisturbed over tens of thousands of
years, making Papua New Guinea something of a linguistic Galapagos.
To get by
day-to-day, Papua New Guineans typically speak three to five languages, and
understand many more dialects.
But
ironically they can sometimes struggle to render a simple sentence in one
language into their mother tongue -- particularly when discussing numbers over
10 or when rural-based languages are deployed to describe life in the big city.
When asked
to say "there are more than 800 languages in Papua New Guinea" in
Vula'a -- which has a couple of thousand speakers in the central province --
Port Moresby office worker Sonia Pegi has to call her dad just to make sure she
has it right.
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Graphic
charting social indicators for Papua New Guinea, venue
for the APEC summit
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'Pidgin
English'
The
country's most widely spoken language is pidgin English or Tok Pisin, although
this being Papua New Guinea, Tok Pisin only claimed its lingua franca status
after beating out a pretender in the form of semi-creole Austronesian language
Hiri Motu.
Tok Pisin,
Hiri Motu and English are the country's three official languages.
"Tok
Pisin is derived 80-85 percent from English," said Jenny Homerang who is
starting a pidgin language course at the Australian National University in
Canberra. "But you also have bits of German and bits of Portuguese."
In fact,
Tok Pisin is something of a linguistic sponge, soaking up words from languages
as distant as Taiwanese and Zulu, which dominates the southeastern corner of
Africa.
Suspected
sorcerers -- who in Papua New Guinea can often be the victims of extreme
violence -- are referred to as "sangoma", a word familiar to anyone
living in Johannesburg or Durban.
Tok Pisin
is also a deeply expressive language: you can 'bagarap' your car in an
accident, or relieve yourself in the 'sithaus'.
But
sometimes things get lost in translation. 'Ol' means 'they', not 'all', which
can confuse a first-time visitor.
Similarly,
'lukim yu bihan' is not an instruction to turn around, but a way of saying
'goodbye'.
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