Re: Congratulation to this newsgroup!

Chess wrote:

> I am amazed that any language with only hundreds of speakers could survive

Anutan has survived for centuries with no more than a few hundred
speakers, as have several other Polynesian outliers. As Matthew has
pointed out, New Guinea has many hundreds of languages. Try a rough
estimate: if the population of the island is, say, 6,000,000 and the
languages are in the order of magnitude of 1,000, then the average
language has 6,000 speakers. Naturally, the situation is more complex:
a few languages have more than 50,000, or even 100,000 speakers, and
that leaves many languages with far fewer than the average. Also, many
New Guineans are familiar with languages other than their own. Probably
at least 15 percent of the world's languages are rarer than the one
described earlier in this thread as being rare.

> are they sufficiently different to not be a patois variant of a similar
> language?

Yes. In New Guinea, some languages spoken by adjacent communities don't
even belong to the same language family---that is, their ancestral
languages (if indeed they descend from a common source) may have
diverged 5,000 to 40,000 years ago. Pick a number.

.

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