How many languages does PNG have?

LANGUAGE

In these monthly discussions we answer one question about language in PNG and beyond. This month we are looking at the number of languages PNG has.

IT is common knowledge that PNG has more languages than any other country. But just how many? When I first came to PNG in 1979, I was told the country had 700 languages. Now the number that most people cite in 830. At a recent conference of the Linguistic Society of Papua New Guinea, university students stressed how important they thought it was to have a definitive number and an authoritative list of all the languages in the country. As these two vastly different numbers show, that will be a difficult task to accomplish.
The first problem is defining what a language actually is. As Professor Peter Mühlhäusler at the University of Adelaide has pointed out, the concept of separate languages that are subdivided into separate dialects is very much a European idea. In Melanesia people traditionally worked more with the idea of “tok ples”.
Your way of speaking is your “tok ples”. It’s your identity. A neighbouring village has a different identity — and therefore a different “tok ples”— it doesn’t matter whether that way of speaking was completely different or so close that you could basically understand everything that the people said. You just complained that they spoke incorrectly and “changed” the language, presumably in the wrong way. The important thing was the degree to which people around you had the same social identity and whether that identity was reflected in the way you spoke.
In many places in Melanesia there is not even a word for “individual language”. In fact, many people grow up not knowing a name for their language. It is just “our language” or “local speech”.
The European idea of language came from the time when languages there began to be written down and standardised. It was important to have one standard way of writing (and later speaking), so that materials could be printed for distribution over a large area. All the people speaking in ways that were close enough to the standard to be able to understand it were said to be speakers of that one language, with the different variations said to be “dialects” of that one language.
If the standard was too difficult to be understood, it was said to be in a different language from yours. Linguistics as a science developed first in Europe, so the concepts of language and dialect used there became accepted as the norm. Two varieties are said to be different languages when their speakers cannot understand each other. When they can understand each other, they are said to be “dialects” of one “language”. These are entirely European concepts.
In some places in Melanesia it is possible to use the same criteria to draw clear lines on a map to separate speakers into groups who can or cannot understand each other. When they cannot understand each other, we say they are separate languages and when they can understand each other, we say that they speak different dialects — varieties — of the same language.
But sometimes it can be difficult to draw distinct lines on a map. One such difficulty that is very common in PNG arises with dialect chains. In a dialect chain, village A can understand the speech of village B and people in village B can understand what people in village C are saying, but people in villages A and C cannot understand each other. In this case, A and B are obviously the same language, just as B and C are the same language. But can we say villages A and C belong to the same language when they cannot understand what each other is saying? Where to draw the line between “languages” is extremely difficult when we have dialect chains.
In other cases people are very bilingual, so that the fact that their speech is unique is hidden from outsiders. This is the case with the speech of people in a village near where I live in New Ireland. At home, people this village, Lakurumau, speak in a unique way, different from the larger Kara and Nalik communities north and south of them.
But traditionally they have always been trilingual, so communication and even intermarriage with Kara and Nalik speakers was never a problem. But although Kara and Nalik people were aware that Lakurumau people did speak in a strange way, their speech was never listed separately on language lists because it was assumed that it was just a variety of Nalik or Kara. This is because whenever anyone ever asked if they spoke Nalik or Kara, the answer was always “yes”. And of course they did. It just wasn’t their home or native language.
It wasn’t until an Italian linguist, Dr Lidia Mazzitelli, worked with local people to study their language a few years ago and showed that it was separate in both its vocabulary and grammar from Kara and Nalik, that it could be recognised as a separate “language”. As she showed, Lakurumau is similar in many ways to Nalik and Kara, but speakers of those languages cannot understand what Lakurumau speakers say to each other. Today it is listed as an independent language on Ethnologue (www.ethnologue.com), the international list of world languages.
As we can see, it will always be difficult to pin down a definite number of languages in the country. Phenomena such as dialect chains and bilingualism mean that we will always have difficulty using the European definition of “language” to work out how many of “languages” PNG actually has.
How many languages does PNG have? Plenty.

• Professor Volker is a linguist living in New Ireland, and an Adjunct Professor in The Cairns Institute, James Cook University in Australia. He welcomes your language questions for this monthly discussion at [email protected].Or continue the discussion on the Facebook Language Toktok page.