Polyglot to the Extreme

It's basically impossible not to be bowled over by the abundance of languages in Papua New Guinea. Though the nation's population clocks in at a shade less than six million souls, those residents speak a mind-boggling 830 languages. That's enough to make PNG the most polyglot country on Earth, beating out runner-up Indonesia by 108 languages. (Nigeria takes third place, with a measly 521 living tongues; the United States has 364.)

We naturally assumed that this abundance of languages was due ...