I'm sure all of you are familiar with the story of the tower of Babel. Right? (if you don't remember, check out Genesis 11) But what you may not be familiar with is that God did a REALLY good job of confusing the languages. Don't believe me? Ok, take a guess at how many languages there are in the world today (and don't look it up on Google first).
If you said anything short of about 6,900, you're wrong. Yup, that's right. There are almost 6,900 known languages spoken in the world today!!! Pretty mind-boggling if you ask me!
According to the Linguistic Society of America, "one area of particularly high linguistic diversity is Papua New Guinea, where there are an estimated 832 languages" (click here for article)
So, your fact of the day for Papua New Guinea: there are over 800 different (and distinct) languages spoken in PNG! There is a trade language called Melanesian Pidgin English, but it is a very basic language with only about 2,500 words.
One of our jobs when we move to Papua New Guinea as missionaries will be to learn one of these languages so that we can share the Gospel with the people in their own language. It will be tough, but we're excited!
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| Learning a new language is hard work! |
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