Demographics of Papua New Guinea

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The indigenous population of Papua New Guinea is one of the most heterogeneous in the world. Papua New Guinea has several thousand separate communities, most with only a few hundred people. Divided by language, customs, and tradition, it is the second most populous nation in Oceania, with a total population estimated variously as being between 9.5 and 10.1 million inhabitants. The isolation created by the mountainous terrain is so great that some groups, until recently, were unaware of the existence of neighboring groups only a few kilometers away. The diversity, reflected in a folk saying, "For each village, a different culture", is perhaps best shown in the local languages. The island of New Guinea contains about 850 languages. The languages that are neither Austronesian nor Australian are considered Papuan languages; this is a geographical rather than linguistic demarcation. Of the Papuan languages, the largest linguistic grouping is considered to be Trans-New Guinean, with between...

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