Papua New Guinea: Population growth fuels conflict amid astonishing cultural diversity

Photo: David Swanson/IRIN

According to news from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, "Unchecked population growth is fast proving an additional source of conflict in Papua New Guinea (PNG), a country with a history of clan violence and clashes over land." Over the past 30 years, the country’s population has more than tripled to 6.7M, and according to a recent government will probably double in the next 25 years. The average fertility rate of 4.4 births per woman is one of the highest in the Pacific region, and more than half of the country’s population is under the age of 20.

This has led to conflicts over land shortages as well as rapid urbanization without commensurate job creation. Exacerbating all this, however, is the remarkable fact that Papua New Guinea, with a population equal to that of Hong Kong, is home to nearly 700 ethnic groups speaking over 800 indigenous languages. This represents 12% of the world's total known tongues, but most have fewer than 1,000 speakers.  The most widely spoken indigenous language, Enga, is spoken by only around 200,000 people.

According to Wikipedia, these languages are not even from the same family (whereas most European languages belong to the Indo-European family). Besides Austronesian languages, there are perhaps 60 small language families, "with unclear relationships to each other or to anything else, plus a large number of language isolates."  What is more surprising is that the majority of these languages are spoken on the one (albeit main) island of New Guinea.

What quirk of human history could have led to such diversity?

Source article:

• PAPUA NEW GUINEA: Population growth fuels conflict (irinnews.org)