Languages of Papua New Guinea (Dahl)

Map Creator: Östen Dahl & Ghazaleh Vafaeian
Data Source: Various web sources including:
Papuan New Guinea Collection of Data Sources

Contact: Östen Dahl & Ghazaleh Vafaeian, Stockholm University
Email: oesten

ling.su.se
Department of Linguistics
Stockholm University
S-106 91 Stockholm

Date Digitized: Sept-2011

Map Description:
This map intends to show the distribution of the indigenous languages of the eastern part of the island of New Guinea, that is, the part that belongs to the Independent State of Papua New Guinea (It thus excludes, for the time being, the Indonesian part of the island and the smaller islands included in Papua New Guinea.) Papua New Guinea is the country in the world that is home to the largest number of living languages, estimated at 830, or 12 per cent of all languages in the world. Of these, 700 are spoken on the main island. Although the geographical area covered is only about 400,000 sq. kms, this makes up roughly 10 per cent of the languages of the world. The map contains full or partial information about approximately 550 of these, or almost 8 per cent of the world's languages.

Papua New Guinea: Pidgins, Creoles and Lingua Francas

Data Source:
Tryon, Darrell. 2007. Australia:Time of Contact. Atlas of the World's Languages, ed. by R. E. Asher and Christopher Moseley, 131. Oxford: Routledge.

"Pacific Pidgins and Creoles: Composite". MultiTree: A Digital Library of Language Relationships

Date Digitized: August 2011

Map Description:
New Guinea Pidgin (Tok Pisin) is the the dominant spoken variety in Papua New Guinea, as can be seen from this map. Its origins lie in the plantations in Samoa where there was English language contact among labourers. Its use then spread across Papua New Guinea and it still possesses typical creole characteristics. This map also shows the movements of specific varieties of Lingua Francas. Most of the Lingua Francas were developed as a result of missionary activity of the churches.

This original map was made by vectorizing data from the MultiTree language database and the Atlas of the World's Languages.

Other LLMAP resources related to this project:
This folder (Australia and the Pacific: Pidgins, Creoles and Lingua Francas) contains other maps which show the distribution of varieties spoken in this region. These maps can be observed side-by-side.

Note: Scanned or downloaded images have been geo-registered for compatibility with our project interface. Slight imperfections are an inevitable result of the registration process.

Maps of Kiwai, Southern

Languages of Papua New Guinea (Dahl)