Papua New Guinea occupies the eastern half of the world’s second-largest island and contains approximately 800 distinct languages, more than any other country on Earth. This linguistic diversity reflects a terrain that is extraordinary: mountain ranges that isolated communities from each other for millennia, river systems navigable only by small boat, coastal areas separated from highlands by hundreds of kilometers of dense jungle.

In this context, two timezones seems almost restrained.

The main clock: UTC+10

Most of Papua New Guinea operates on Pacific/Port_Moresby, UTC+10. Port Moresby, the capital, sits on the southern coast of the main island. No daylight saving time. No adjustments. The offset has been stable for decades.

Port Moresby holds a peculiar distinction among capital cities: it has almost no road connections to the rest of the country. There are no roads linking Port Moresby to the Highlands, to the Sepik River basin, or to most provincial centers. Getting there, for most Papua New Guineans, means flying or sailing.

Bougainville and UTC+11

The Autonomous Region of Bougainville is listed separately in the IANA database as Pacific/Bougainville, operating at UTC+11. This one-hour difference from the rest of PNG is recent: Bougainville switched to UTC+11 in 2014.

The switch was a local decision, driven partly by Bougainville’s sense of itself as a distinct political entity moving toward independence, and partly by practical alignment with Solomon Islands, which shares the UTC+11 offset and with which Bougainville has geographic and cultural ties.

Bougainville’s relationship with independence has a long and bloody history.

The Bougainville War

From 1988 to 1998, Bougainville was the site of one of the Pacific’s most devastating conflicts. The Bougainville Revolutionary Army fought Papua New Guinea’s national government over a combination of issues: resentment over the Panguna copper mine, which had extracted enormous wealth from Bougainville while leaving environmental devastation and poverty; cultural identity (Bougainvilleans, especially in the south, are ethnically Melanesian but distinct from mainland PNG populations); and a desire for self-determination.

The PNG government imposed a blockade. The island was cut off from medicine, fuel, and basic supplies. Estimates of deaths range from 10,000 to 20,000 in a population of under 200,000. The Panguna mine, once one of the world’s largest open-pit copper operations, was shut down by the conflict and has never reopened.

A peace process concluded in 2001. Under the Bougainville Peace Agreement, Bougainville received autonomous status and the right to hold an independence referendum.

That referendum took place in November and December 2019. The result: 98.31 percent voted for independence. Negotiations on the terms of that independence are ongoing with the PNG government.

Moving to UTC+11 in 2014, five years before the referendum, was a quiet preview of that vote. We run our own time here.

800 languages

The Summer Institute of Linguistics, which has catalogued languages in PNG for decades, counts approximately 840 living languages. For context, that is around 12 percent of all the world’s languages, in a country of fewer than 10 million people.

Many of these languages have no more than a few hundred speakers. Some are spoken in a single village. The highland valleys that are so hard to cross by land are also the places where linguistic diversity flourished: if you never meet your neighbors, you develop your own language.

Tok Pisin, a creole, serves as the main lingua franca. It developed from contact between Melanesian workers and English-speaking colonial employers in the 19th century and is now spoken by the majority of the population as a second language and by many as a first.

For developers

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