Episode 24  Why New Guinea Has So Many Languages

Dr John McWhorter (2019)

Film Review

Humans first arrived in New Guinea 70,000 years ago. The island is extremely mountainous with lots of swamps and little island. This means that the societies that developed tended to be cut off from one another.

The eastern half of New Guinea is an Indonesia colony. The western half, known as Papua New Guinea features 750 different languages. Each is spoken by less than a few thousand people and half belong to the Trans New Guinean family. The rest either belong to a half dozen other language families or are totally unrelated isolates. Trans New Guinean languages are also spoken in the Solomon Islands (in the South Pacific) and (like Austronesian languages – see What South Pacific Languages Reveal About the Evolution of Language) have the same word for he and she, five vowel sounds and a small number of consonants.

Because none of the Papuan languages are written, they tend to be more elaborate and differentiated than modern languages.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/watch/video/6120000/6120048