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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

As I understand it one of the reasons why PNG developed so many unique languages is the extreme geographic complexity of the place. This resulted in language developing in isolation.

I have a personal theory that people living hunter/gatherer or very small scale subsistence agriculture lifestyles historically did not have a ton of surplus calories to spend on hiking over multiple ridges and mountain ranges to discover who's living in the valley 45 km away. The complexity of the jungle environment also makes it very difficult to 'bush whack' through somewhere that no trail exists. And if a foot trail isn't frequently used it will become overgrown very quickly.

Google "language isolates in papua new guinea".

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=language+...

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> Google "language isolates in papua new guinea".

My preferred source for these things is Palmer’s Language families of the New Guinea Area [0] (part of the extremely comprehensive book, The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area). Page 10 has a nice map of language families and isolates.

[0] https://www.academia.edu/86071361/The_languages_and_linguist...

I am the furthest possible thing from a linguist but looking at a hastily searched language map of PNG, my first thought is "wow, that's a lot. And some of those aren't even in the same family of language?"

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f6/TNG_map....

> wow, that's a lot. And some of those aren't even in the same family of language?

Indeed! Palmer counts ‘862 languages comprising 43 distinct families […] and 37 isolates’, (where an isolate is a language with no known relationship to any other family). I should add that the map you linked shows the branches of only a single language family, namely Trans–New Guinea — most of the other 42 families are in the grey areas. (Though due to uncertainties in historical linguistics, that map includes some groups as part of Trans–New Guinea which Palmer considers separate families, for instance Timor—Alor–Pantar [there part of ‘West Trans–New Guinea’] and South Bird’s Head.)

It's important to note that languages evolve much faster without a writing tradition to anchor the language down over time.

> my first thought is "wow, that's a lot. And some of those aren't even in the same family of language?"

The meaning of the historical linguistics term "family" doesn't map directly to our common usage.

A language family is a collection of languages for a which we can identify a significant number of shared core historical grammatical and lexical features.

Just because languages belong to different families doesn't mean they don't have a shared ancestry, just that we can't see it in the modern languages.

If anything, in PNG population genetics identifies the highland populations as closely genetically related, but their languages have diverged to the point that signs their shared ancestry have been lost.

There is an theory that the linguistic diversity PNG represents the state of human societies in Southwestern Asia just before the emergence of agriculture - possibly explaining why many ancient attested languages like Sumerian, Elamite, and Assyrian which were in close proximity appear to be entirely unrelated to each other.

It is the same how languages in Caucasus are isolated from each other - mountains are high and act as borders between different people, even if in straight line they would be living very near.

TFA answered it though. It's because neighboring tribes were always hostile, and they never developed food that survived long expeditions.

Not an expert view, but I have also heard this explanation for the many hundreds of languages in Africa and India.

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