I find it hard to believe New Guinea really has 840 distinct languages, even if they have 18 language families. A lot of those languages must be highly mutually intelligible, what we would count as dialects in European countries. I live in Japan, a country with similar geography to New Guinea, but about half the land area. Japan has steep, densely forested mountains separating dozens of isolated river valleys, with a few coastal plains. Accordingly, there are dozens of dialects of Japanese spread across the islands of Japan, and one language isolate, Ainu. In the 1950s the Japanese linguist Misao Tojo classified Japanese dialects with high mutual intelligibility into 16 regional groups. I read on Wikipedia that the 18 languages families of New Guinea can be divided into about 60 smaller groups. That numbers seems to like a much more reasonable estimate of how many distinct languages there are given the size of the island.
this is so fascinating! is this something you would learn about as a linguistics major? i would love to take a class on topics like this, and learn about how environment and history affects language.
I'd think colonialism doesn't have such an effect of Papuan (and even generally southeast asian) linguistic areas due to there not being any major population replacements and settler colonialism unlike in the Americas. In the Americas, Spain and Portugal replaced a lot of the indigenous populations, while in the Philippines (although we have many Spanish loanwords), our languages weren't replaced because indigenous Filipinos remained as the majority throughout our colonial history So glad I've found this channel though!!! looking forwards to watching the other vids
