Papua New Guinea

The most linguistically diverse country on earth, where over eight hundred languages are spoken by fewer than eleven million people. The New Guinea highlands were farmed at Kuk Swamp around nine thousand years ago, making this one of the small number of places where agriculture was invented independently, and the mountain valleys kept communities separate enough that language multiplied rather than consolidated. Much of the interior was unknown to outsiders until the 1930s, when Australian prospectors walked into densely populated highland valleys nobody had mapped. Colonial division came late and untidily: Britain and Germany split the eastern half in 1884, Australia inherited Papua in 1906 and took German New Guinea in 1914, administering the two separately until 1949. The Second World War was fought across it, along the Kokoda Track and at Rabaul, Buna and the Sepik, at enormous cost to the people living there. Independence came on 16 September 1975. The Panguna copper mine on Bougainville, whose revenues went largely elsewhere and whose tailings destroyed the valley, provoked a civil war from 1988 that killed thousands and ended with an autonomy settlement and a 2019 referendum voting overwhelmingly for independence. Wantok obligations and clan loyalty structure politics more than parties do. Tok Pisin is the practical national language. Roughly four-fifths of the population still lives from its own gardens. Port Moresby is the capital. The country shares the island with Indonesian Papua along a straight line drawn in 1885. Mount Wilhelm rises above four thousand metres. Birds of paradise appear on the flag and the currency.

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