Babel

«New Guinea has by far the higheast concentration of languages in the world: 1000 out of the world’s 6000 languages, crammed into na area only slightly larger than that of Texas, and divided into dozens of language families and isolated languages as different from each other as English is from Chinese. Nearly half of all New Guinea languages have fewer than 500 speakers, and even the largest language groups (still a mere 100,000 speakers) were politically fragmented into hundreds of villages, fighting as fiercely with each other as with speakers of other languages.»

Guns, germs and steel, Jared Diamond