Countries With the Most Languages

Yes, I was surprised by that too. I tried Kenya and South Africa and then thought that there probably weren't any in Africa. Big mistake.

It must be hell to order a pizza in PNG.

Or maybe just order a people pizza.

South Africa has 11 official languages.

Is it because Chad is your boyfriend?

Maybe it only counts permanent residents?

Brexit....

NATIVE languages

Which country is that?

I didn't even notice the thumbnail but ended up getting PNG with a lucky guess near the end

Because you live in Guam

no but oshawott is right, the statistics come from ethnologue, and they have fairly strict criteria for what they count as a language, even quite divergent "dialects" are not counted if they are not distinct enough. so the diversity in vanuatu and papua–matamata guinea (png) is true - they are regions in which many factors beneficial for the preservation of languages coincide - the terrain is at the same time mountaneous and rugged, often densly forested and consisting of many small islands, which are all isolating factors; in addition, most people learn the lingua francas only as secondary languages, and thus retain the language of their family as their primary first language, etc.

this makes it somewhat possible even for very small languages spoken by quite isolated communities (oftentimes between 100 and 1000 people) to retain a living language and pass it on.

this is very different to a lot of other areas in the world, where indigenous and other languages are being minoritised at

...a staggering rate due to assimilation, shame attached to the minoritised languages and forced resulting monolingualism of the majoritised languages, and where even the traditional scope of linguistic diversity might be a lot bigger than most people think, which it most definitely is - traditional varieties of f.ex many european languages are wildly divergent, but due to geographic and historic factors, they still do not come close, and in the modern day those are extremely levelled out, ie. the distinctive features of those varieties are declining very much for every generation, due to language policy by nation states amounting to cultural genocide in so many places

definitely so!

i think it was a non profit called endangered languages initiative that had done some cataloguing about all the galuta, galuth/golus/gules etc. - diasporic languages spoken in the manaháahtan area (nyc) and concluded that by language density and amount it as a region is the most diverse in the world, over 500 languages. and as you said, in all of these countries on the list and those that aren't, with the number of diaspora languages included the amounts would be many hundreds higher for most.

and speaking of the lääʹddlaž ("finnish" in sääʹmǩiõll - "skolt sámi") population registry, even there languages that are spoken by under five people aren't counted, for privacy reasons, if i remember correctly, so there are even more than that. (not to mention that this government considers some indigenous languages to be foreign languages without equal status to the official ones (karielan kieli/karjalan kieli/kard'alan kiel' ("karelian"))..