Nicholas Evans, Marian Klamer

The region where Papuan languages are spoken - centred on the Island of New Guinea, with extensions westward into Timor and the islands of eastern Indonesia, and eastward into the Solomon Islands - is at the same time the most linguistically diverse zone of the planet and the part of the logosphere. It packs around 20% of the world's languages into less than 1% of its surface area and less than 0.1% of its population. The absolute level of linguistic diversity - whether measured in sheer numbers of languages, or in terms of "maximal clades' of unrelatable units - is comparable to the whole of Eurasia.