It is a group of around 750 languages which belong to more than 60 language families. It is spoken by around 50 million people in New Guinea and neighboring islands like Timor, New Ireland, New Britain, Solomon Islands etc. which basically constitutes western Pacific region making this region linguistically diverse as compared to rest of the world. Although languages belonging to Papuan group are geographically close however their structure is quite varied. The term Papuan was coined to distinguish this group of languages from the Austronesian languages of the region. Due to their diverse nature, lot of information on these languages and trends in their classification is not available. Preliminary classification work done by Joseph Greenberg, Stephen Wurm and Malcolm Ross is considered significant steps in this direction. The largest family that has been classified so far is Trans-New Guinea Phylum.
The majority of the Papuan languages are spoken in New Guinea island which is divided between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Official language of Papua New Guinea are Tok Pisin (mostly used in business and government), Hiri Motu (also called Police Motu and is mostly influenced by English) and English.
