Papua New Guinea's culture: a thousand groups and one common tongue

How many languages Papua New Guinea speaks

No count is final, because the line between a language and a dialect is drawn differently by different scholars. Wikipedia's article on the country's languages cites Ethnologue and other sources for 840 living languages, and Britannica for more than 800 indigenous ones; the World Bank says over 850. Most are spoken by small communities: Wikipedia's country article gives an average of about 7,000 speakers per language, many with fewer than a thousand. The language with most speakers is Enga, with about 200,000, followed by Melpa and Huli.

The languages fall into two unrelated groups. Britannica counts some 200 Austronesian languages, spoken mostly on the coasts and islands by people whose ancestors arrived in Wikipedia's account about 3,500 years ago, and about 550 non-Austronesian or Papuan languages, spoken mostly inland by the great majority of the population. "Papuan" is a label of convenience for everything that is not Austronesian, not a family.

Four languages have national standing. No single law proclaims official languages; the constitution calls for "universal literacy in Pisin, Hiri Motu or English" alongside tok ples, the local languages, and Papua New Guinean Sign Language was recognised as a fourth national language in May 2015.

Wikipedia's country article reports that the use of almost all local languages is declining, some to fewer than 100 speakers. After independence the government taught early literacy in local languages, and by April 2000 837 languages had some educational support; in 2013 schooling moved back towards English to raise low English literacy.

Why Tok Pisin became the common tongue

Tok Pisin began, in Wikipedia's account, among labourers from many islands thrown together on plantations in Queensland and elsewhere during the blackbirding trade of the 19th century. It took its vocabulary mainly from English, with German, Malay, Portuguese and local words, perhaps above all from Kuanua, the language of the Tolai of East New Britain. In German New Guinea it became the working language between officials and the people they governed, while in Papua the administration used Hiri Motu, a simplified form of the Motu spoken around Port Moresby.

The Second World War and the movement of workers that followed carried Tok Pisin into Papua, and it has kept spreading. Wikipedia's article on the language puts the number who use it to some degree at five to six million and those who use it as their main language at perhaps one million, many of them children of parents from different language groups. It is often the language of debate in Parliament, while most government documents are written in English. Even Enga Province, where one local language dominates, adopted Tok Pisin as its official language in 1976. The press follows the same split. Britannica describes radio as the medium that reaches isolated communities, television as an urban habit, and the English-language dailies, which are foreign-owned, as having a modest circulation; the Tok Pisin weekly Wantok is owned by a consortium of Christian churches.

What the clan and the wantok owe each other

Daily life in most of Papua New Guinea centres on the extended family and the clan. Britannica describes the clan as the main unit of social organisation, almost always tracing descent through the male line, with marriage required to cross clan lines and land rights held by groups. In the Highlands men once slept in men's houses and women in separate garden houses with the small children, a system that has since been modified in much of the region.

The wantok system carries those bonds into towns. People who move to the cities, Britannica writes, take their languages with them, keep their customs and rebuild their social structures; the obligations of the wantok can support newcomers and place heavy demands on kin who have done well, and are often blamed for corruption. Wikipedia's article on the culture describes leadership in many communities as held by a "big man", whose standing is earned and must be shown by giving wealth away, and links that expectation to patronage in modern politics.

The family is also where the deepest inequality lies. Wikipedia's culture article calls the difference between men and women the largest source of inequality in traditional communities, and Britannica notes that even matrilineal societies remain male-dominated.

How shells and pigs still settle debts

Shells were wealth long before they were coins. Wikipedia records that seashells served as currency until they were abolished as money in 1933, that in the Highlands far from the coast they were once worth more than steel, and that in parts of East New Britain they still function as currency. The national currency, the kina, takes its name from a gold-lipped pearl shell.

Bride price is the clearest survival. Depending on the region, a groom's family may pay in golden-edged clam shells, lengths of shell money, pigs, cassowaries or cash; elsewhere it is the bride's side that pays. Britannica lists the opening of a road among the economic transactions still marked by music and dance, alongside births, deaths, initiations and peacemaking.

Food rests on the same gardens and the same animals. The village staples are yams and taro, sweet potato in the Highlands and sago in the river swamps, and the pig is the principal livestock. The tourism authority describes the mumu, food slow-cooked in a ground oven, as a practice still followed today.

Where the singsing became a national show

A singsing is a gathering of song and dance. The performers paint themselves and dress in feathers and pearls, with animal skins, to stand for birds or trees or mountain spirits, and some re-enact a battle. Plumes of the bird-of-paradise, which also appears on the flag and the national emblem, remain central to them. Wikipedia's culture article records that singsings have been competitive since 1953, with contests in Port Moresby, Mount Hagen and Goroka.

The shows that grew from those contests are now the country's largest cultural events. Britannica describes the annual shows at Goroka and Mount Hagen as drawing thousands of dance groups and many thousands of spectators from across the country and abroad. The national tourism authority's calendar runs from the National Mask Festival in East New Britain in July through the Mount Hagen Show in August and the Goroka Show in September to the National Kenu and Kundu Festival in Milne Bay in November, and billed the 2026 Goroka Show, held from 18 to 20 September, as marking its 70th anniversary. The dances of the Asaro Mudmen and the Huli are known internationally.

Music outside the shows has changed fast. Wikipedia's culture article lists the common traditional instruments: the garamut slit drum, the kundu hand drum, bamboo flutes, the susap mouth harp and others with more local use. Guitars and ukuleles spread after the Second World War and string bands were popular by the early 1950s. Bamboo bands, a style from Solomon Islands played by striking bamboo tubes with sandals, arrived at Madang in the mid-1970s and spread from there. Sanguma, formed in 1977 at the National Arts School, toured abroad. Britannica describes the kundu, an hourglass-shaped drum, as essential to song and dance at national celebrations such as Independence Day.

How houses follow climate and clan

Building, like language, changes from valley to valley. Britannica describes traditional houses adapted to their setting, from houses dug into the ground to keep warm in the colder parts of the Highlands to houses on stilts over the sea in sheltered coastal bays, which keep out mosquitoes and make sanitation simpler. In isolated parts of the southern interior some of the giant communal houses that once held all the men of a settlement still stand, ringed by the smaller houses of the women.

Village plans follow the social order. On many coasts villages run in long lines between the beach and an inland swamp, divided into clan or family sections. In the Eastern Highlands and Chimbu, houses once clustered on ridgetops for defence have moved down to the roads; in the Western Highlands and Enga the old form is scattered homesteads, each in its own land, with separate houses for men and women. Britannica notes that these forms are giving way as Western-style houses spread, and that over half the people of Port Moresby live in improvised housing in settlements.

What carvers and writers made of the old forms

Wood carving from the Sepik, the Gulf, the Massim islands and the Huon Peninsula is known far outside the country. Britannica singles out Sepik masks and crocodile figures with religious meaning, and notes that many sacred carvings from the great men's houses on the Sepik, the haus tambaran, have been sold and never replaced. The Malagan carving of New Ireland is held in many museum collections. The Papua New Guinea National Museum and Art Gallery at Waigani in Port Moresby holds a large ethnographic collection.

A national literature arrived with independence. Albert Maori Kiki's autobiography Ten Thousand Years in a Lifetime was published in 1968 and Vincent Eri's Crocodile, the first Papua New Guinean novel, in 1970, the year the government began publishing writers in several languages. Painters of the first contemporary generation, among them Mathias Kauage, worked in Port Moresby, and Britannica describes painting on canvas as a cottage industry whose buyers are tourists and resident expatriates as well as the local middle class.

How Christianity sits beside older belief

Christianity arrived with French Marist missionaries on Woodlark Island on 15 September 1847, and missions were for a long time the main channel of Western culture as well as religion. At the 2011 census 95.6% of citizens described themselves as Christian. Catholics made up 26.0%, the Evangelical Lutheran Church 18.4%, Seventh-day Adventists 12.9% and Pentecostal churches 10.4%, in Wikipedia's figures. In March 2025 a constitutional amendment named the country Christian and the Bible a national symbol.

Older belief has not gone. Britannica records that rituals of magic and sorcery are still widely practised, and Wikipedia's country article describes syncretism, Christian faith combined with traditional practice, as common. Accusations of sorcery remain a source of violence: the Sorcery Act of 1971, which allowed an accusation of sorcery as a defence to murder, was repealed only in 2013, and an estimated 50 to 150 people accused of witchcraft are killed each year, in the figure Wikipedia's politics article reports.

Sport is the other shared faith. Britannica notes that games brought by colonists and missionaries took on a style of their own, with a match able to stir village or district loyalty, and that wealthy election candidates often sponsor teams. Rugby league is followed passionately enough to be called the national game, and the annual State of Origin series between two Australian states is watched across the country. Papua New Guinea has competed at the Commonwealth Games since 1962 and at the Olympic Games since Montreal in 1976, and since 2000 traditional canoe and sailing races have been revived. More on the country's past is in the history article, and on visiting the shows in the travel article.