1: the air we breathe

Papua New Guinea has more languages than any other country in the world. In an area the size of the state of California, and with just over eight million people, there are almost one thousand separate languages—nota bene, separate languages, not just separate dialects or variants—most of them still undocumented and many of them spoken by groups of five hundred people or fewer.
Even more compelling was the villagers’ explanation for this sudden tip. When I asked them why their children weren’t speaking Tayap, mothers and fathers all insisted that they wanted their children to speak it—and that they were raising their children exactly like their parents had raised them. What had changed, though, those parents told me, was the kids themselves. The children no longer wanted to learn Tayap. They were too bigheaded, adults told me, meaning that their kids were too willful and stubborn to speak the language. A mystery congealed: The Case of the Bigheaded Babies.