Going to Papua New Guinea? Consider bringing a big phrasebook.

In the above map, each country’s area is approximately proportional to the number of indigenous languages it has produced. The map, which appears in Limits of Language by Swedish linguist Mikael Parkvall, is accompanied by the following caption:

Languages are very unevenly distributed among the countries of the world. The map tries to capture this fact by rendering each country in a size corresponding to the number of languages spoken in it. (Because of the inherent problems in accomplishing this, sizes are rather approximate). The ten shaded countries are those in which more than 200 languages are in use.

Why does Papua New Guinea have so many indigenous languages? Deep valleys and harsh terrain have long kept the different tribes and groups of Papua New Guinea from interacting, so that languages are not conflated but remain distinct. While the country is thought to have over 800 living languages, some, like Abaga, are spoken by as few as five people.