Who has more languages, PNG or Vanuatu?

Weekender

In these monthly discussions we answer one question about language in PNG and beyond. This month we are looking at whether Papua New Guinea or Vanuatu can claim to be the most linguistically diverse country on earth.

PAPUA New Guineans are used to hearing that they have more languages than any other country, with a current count of 840 living and 11 known extinct languages according to Ethnologue, the SIL (Summer Institute of Linguistics) listing of all the languages on earth. But there is a rival to the claim of the most linguistically diverse country on earth – the equally Melanesian, but much smaller country of Vanuatu. How can this be?
It depends on how we define “diverse”. If we look only at the actual number of living languages, the 840 languages of Papua New Guinea is, of course, much larger than the number of living languages Ethnologue lists for Vanuatu, 110. But if we compare the number of languages to the national population then with a population of around 300,000, then there is one language for every 2727 ni-Vanuatu. With an estimated population of around 8 million, PNG has “only” one language for every 9523 Papua New Guineans. Vanuatu clearly packs in more languages per capita than PNG does.
End of story? Not quite. Let’s look at how the languages within each country are related to one another. All the languages of Vanuatu except the two introduced official languages (English and French) and the national language, Bislama (a pidgin-creole language closely related to PNG’s Tok Pisin) belong to one language family, the Austronesian Oceanic family. This family includes most of the languages of the South Pacific, including Fijian, the languages of Micronesia, and all the Polynesian languages.
Many of PNG’s languages are also Austronesian Oceanic languages. But the vast majority of PNG languages belong to other language families or are “language isolates”, languages for which linguists cannot find any other related languages. Besides introduced English and two pidgin-creole languages based on European languages (Tok Pisin and Unserdeutsch), PNG languages can be divided into 25 families of related languages, with many languages that do not seem to be related to any other languages in PNG or, indeed, anywhere else in the world. In the number of language families, PNG is clearly more diverse than Vanuatu.
What about official languages? The situation in Vanuatu is easier to ascertain than in PNG, since the Vanuatu constitution specifically sets out that Bislama is the national language and English and French are also official languages of education and government.
The PNG constitution does not specify what language or languages are national or official languages, but from the fact that the constitution was written in English and there are specific situations in the constitution where Tok Pisin and Hiri Motu are mentioned, we can infer that at independence PNG also had three official languages. In 2015 Parliament added PNG Sign Language an official language, so that we can say PNG has four official languages, one more than Vanuatu.
Both PNG and Vanuatu have an English-based pidgin-creole language as one of their official languages, Tok Pisin and Bislama. Both are, in fact, mutually intelligible dialects of a much larger Melanesian Pidgin English. But PNG has two other living pidgin-creole languages, Hiri Motu (which used to be called Police Motu) and the now almost extinct Unserdeutsch (also known as Rabaul Creole German, spoken by the mixed-race community that emerged from the Vunapope Catholic Mission near Kokopo).
Papua New Guinea therefore has more pidgin-creole language diversity than Vanuatu.
Besides their official languages inherited from their colonising powers, both PNG and Vanuatu have languages spoken by immigrant communities. In recent years both countries have had an influx of residents from around the world, speaking dozens of new languages. But if we want to see communities and immigrant languages established over a period of several generations, we should limit ourselves to communities established before each country gained independence, PNG in 1975 and Vanuatu in 1980.
During the German colonial period before World War I, large numbers of Chinese workers were brought to German New Guinea, mainly Rabaul. They brought with them several Chinese languages. Most spoke Cantonese, although some spoke Hakka.
A much smaller group of workers and their families were brought from Ambon Island, in what is now eastern Indonesia. They spoke a dialect of Malay. Today the Ambonese community has been linguistically assimilated and all but around 1000 of the “old Chinese” have emigrated to Australia.
Of those who still remain in PNG, all speak English and Tok Pisin, but some still speak Cantonese. The number of languages spoken by the descendants of pre-independence immigrants is therefore two: Cantonese and English.
Vanuatu received more pre-independence immigrants than PNG. Besides Europeans and Hakka and Cantonese-speaking Chinese, there were large numbers of people from Vietnam, which, like Vanuatu was also a French colony. The number of languages spoken by the descendants of these pre-independence immigrants and Europeans is five: Hakka, Cantonese, Vietnamese, English, French, and Chinese. Vanuatu therefore has more long established immigrant language diversity than PNG.
So who wins the linguistic diversity contest between these two Melanesian wantoks? It’s a mixed bag. In terms of absolute numbers of languages, it is PNG, which is also more diverse in the number of language families, since all Vanuatu languages belong to just one language family, the Oceanic Austronesian family.
PNG also has more pidgin-creole languages than Vanuatu, as well as one more official language than Vanuatu does. In terms of the ratio of languages to people, however, Vanuatu is much more diverse. It is also more diverse in the number of long established immigrant languages.
As we have seen, linguistic diversity can be measured in a number of different ways. However we measure it, in both PNG and Vanuatu, the richness of languages adds to the cultural wealth of their citizens.
People hear and speak a number of languages every day and a person who knows only one language is very unusual. Both countries share the explosion of linguistic diversity that is found more in Melanesia than any other place in the world.

  •  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.