Most diversity in the smallest area

What's a region that, in an alternate timeline, can have the most diversity in the smallest area?

The differences can be religious, linguistic, cultural, and/or ethnic. Self-identification (tribal, clan, etc.) can also make a difference even if two groups are similar.

A single city or metropolitan area with many immigrant communities does not count.

Bonus points if the region is in a fairly homogenous area in OTL.
 
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Hm. . . Well New Guinea and the Caucuses run for it fairly good OTL. I think those ar about the peak you could get, but maybe you could manage loads of ethnic groups cramming into th Alps or Himalayas?
 
I would say New York or Toronto are the best possible candidates for that. It would be really simple POD to, just more immigration to Canada and or the USA
 
Israel, it is a chokepoint where Europe, Asia and Africa meet for both land annd sea travel. Singapore is another as a maritime chokepoint, there are plenty around the world.
 
I'm thinking perhaps no rise of Rome, but somehow a collapse of Greece and Carthage. Perhaps a plague that affects the Hellenistic and Punic worlds.

Then all the little tribes in Europe keep diverging.

Later on some sort of large empire is established in Gaul and Italy and many slaves are taken from the various tribes to the north, east, and west.

Several centuries later, northern Gaul is conquered by the first industrial state, in Britannia, which has immigrants from across a colonial empire that it establishes (mostly conquers from Lusitania or whatever is the largest state in Iberia).

A couple centuries after that immigrants from Africa, Asia, etc. immigrate to the state in Northern Gaul, remaining parts of separate clans or tribes.
 
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I would say New York or Toronto are the best possible candidates for that. It would be really simple POD to, just more immigration to Canada and or the USA

They already do in OTL (especially New York) without any extra immigration.

Queens itself with a population of over 2.2 million, 46% of whom are foreign-born, holds over 100 different nations/ethnicities and has over 138 different languages actively (to various degrees) spoken in it.
 
The best bet would be a mountainous region where communication is difficult and where the terrain is too rough to support large collectivities, thus permitting the development of many small cultures and slowing the rate of cultural borrowing. Someone already mentioned New Guinea; the Caucasus would also be a good candidate, as would New Caledonia where a precolonial population of under 100,000 spoke more than 30 languages.
 
Small-scale agricultural communities, mixed together with hunter-gatherer tribes, in a very resource-rich area that can support a large population. Something like Papua New Guinea. There should be little need or want for trading, creating isolation. Hunter-gathering tribes in a fertile region by themselves seem to produce incredible linguistic diversity. Small, isolated tribes can have a great deal of cultural and religious diversity from each other.

So, in conclusion, for the greatest diversity, you should have a mountainous, extremely resource-rich area in a location that can be settled by hunter-gatherers from multiple regions. (Such as some from the north, some from the west, etc.) You could also have some early, very low-tech subsistence farmers living in a few areas for even more diversity, but the land itself should be rugged and diverse enough that the farmers can't take over. This could all result in an incredible amount of linguistic and cultural diversity in a very dense area.
 
OTL Taiwan is really diverse, it is the central point of Austronesian Languages.
Not diverse when it's 98% Han Chinese.

How about an ultra-paranoid and power-hungry dictator, a cross between Genghis Khan and Stalin, who ruled over a vast empire with plenty of empty land, to which he deports undesirables from all across the vast empire? You'd have Germans, Poles, Greeks, Serbs, Iranians, Muslim Turks, Russians, Chinese, Mongol, Koreans, all living together in large numbers. Sort of like Kazakhstan.
 
Actually any area with a small population that is not big enough to support a single linguistic community or stop a language from breaking will be diverse but if the population increases the diversity will be lost.
 
Not diverse when it's 98% Han Chinese.
That's only cause at least half the tribes and anyone who is less than half aboriginal are counted as Han. You can be a quarter Amis and speak fluent Amis, but the government won't call you aboriginal. Even if you only consider the 2% that's officially recognized, that's 12 languages, some with multiple mutually unintelligible dialects plus another 4 languages that are spoken by unrecognized tribes, all in an area less than half the size of Israel given the restricted area most of the tribes live in.

Anyway, the OP says alternate timeline, so you can always get rid of mass Han migration.
 
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The Balkans? You've got loads of people who passed through there, if they can maintain their cultural identity.

Dacian, Greek, Thracian, Illyrian, Moesian, Paeonian, Persian, Celtic, Roman, Scythian, Sarmatian, Goths, Huns, Alans, Gepids, Lombards, Sciri, Hungarians, Avars, Bulgars, Turks..... and this is just OTL, think about if you had Arabs, Mongols, Armenians, Italians, end such.
 
The Balkans? You've got loads of people who passed through there, if they can maintain their cultural identity.

Dacian, Greek, Thracian, Illyrian, Moesian, Paeonian, Persian, Celtic, Roman, Scythian, Sarmatian, Goths, Huns, Alans, Gepids, Lombards, Sciri, Hungarians, Avars, Bulgars, Turks..... and this is just OTL, think about if you had Arabs, Mongols, Armenians, Italians, end such.
Still hard to beat 841 languages in papua new guinea.
 

Esopo

Banned
What's a region that, in an alternate timeline, can have the most diversity in the smallest area?

The differences can be religious, linguistic, cultural, and/or ethnic. Self-identification (tribal, clan, etc.) can also make a difference even if two groups are similar.

A single city or metropolitan area with many immigrant communities does not count.

Bonus points if the region is in a fairly homogenous area in OTL.

I think that imperial rome was the best case of diversity. Literally people from everywhere in the empire.
 
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