Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea, officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is an island country in Oceania comprising the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and offshore islands in Melanesia, bordered by Indonesia and with maritime borders toward Australia and the Solomon Islands, with Port Moresby as its capital across 462,840 square kilometers of mainland and hundreds of islands. The eastern half of New Guinea was divided in 1884 between German New Guinea in the north and British New Guinea in the south, the latter ceded to Australia in 1902 as the Territory of Papua; Australia occupied German New Guinea during the First World War and administered it as a League of Nations mandate, the region saw fierce fighting in the Second World War's New Guinea campaign, and the two territories were united in 1949 before Papua New Guinea gained independence as a Commonwealth realm in 1975, with a governor-general representing the monarch under a Westminster system led by a prime minister. The population is highly rural, with only 14 percent living in urban centers in 2023, and is extremely diverse, with 840 known spoken languages making it the world's most linguistically diverse country, though English and Tok Pisin serve as common tongues; official population estimates put the population around 11.8 million, though satellite-based estimates suggest closer to 17 million. The country has a large Christian majority, and in March 2025 its constitution was amended to adopt Christianity as the official state religion; nearly 40 percent of the population are subsistence farmers, and Papua New Guinea retains close ties to Australia while deepening ties with Asia and the Pacific.