Papua New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse country on the planet, boasting over eight hundred and forty distinct living languages spoken by various indigenous tribes.

A closer look

Papua New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse country on the planet, boasting over eight hundred and forty distinct living languages spoken by various indigenous tribes. This incredible linguistic fragmentation occurred because deep valleys, dense rainforests, and unforgiving mountains kept local communities isolated from one another for thousands of years, preventing any single dominant tongue from taking over. It is a stunning display of human cultural evolution, but it also sounds like an absolute nightmare for any hapless lost tourist trying to ask for directions to the nearest bathroom. You could learn a completely new dialect with an entirely different grammatical structure just by walking ten miles over a hill, which really puts things into perspective when you consider that most Americans still violently struggle to conjugate basic Spanish verbs after three mandatory years of high school classes!