Concept

Language isolate

Overview

A language isolate, sometimes called an isolated language, is a language that has no demonstrable genealogical relationship with any other language. That is, an isolate is a language family that only contains one member. Basque in Europe, Ainu (if counted as a single language) and Burushaski in Asia, Sandawe and Hadza in Africa, Haida and Zuni in North America, Kanoê and Trumai in South America, Tiwi and possibly Porome in Oceania are examples of language isolates, as too are well attested extinct languages such as Sumerian and Elamite. The exact number of language isolates is unknown due to insufficient data on several languages; that is, there is a fuzzy boundary between language isolates and unclassified languages. Researchers may have differing criteria on how much comparative work needs to be done before concluding that a language is an isolate.

"Isolate" does not mean that a language has no relatives, only that any relationships are too distant to be detectable. Most established families of oral languages – including isolates – are assumed to be related to each other at a time depth too great for us to reconstruct. (See linguistic monogenesis.)

Another possibility is that the language arose independently and does not share a common linguistic genesis with any other language. This possibility is often posited for sign languages that are thought to have developed independently of other oral or sign languages.

In some classifications, a language may be counted as an isolate once all known relatives are extinct. An example is the Ket language spoken in central Siberia, which belongs to the wider Yeniseian family, all the others of which are now extinct. Ket is thus an isolate in the current context. However, most classifications do not count Ket as a language isolate because it does have demonstrable relatives, even if they no longer exist except in recorded data. If those relatives had gone extinct without being recorded, then Ket would be an isolate in the stricter sense.

Isolates may be reclassified as larger families if some of their purported dialects are later judged to be sufficiently different from each other to count as different languages. Examples include the erstwhile isolates of Japanese and Georgian: Japanese is now considered to be the Japonic language family (which includes the Ryukyuan languages), and Georgian to be the Kartvelian language family.

There is a difference between language isolates and unclassified languages, but they can be difficult to differentiate when data is limited. If comparative efforts do prove fruitful, a language previously considered an isolate may be reclassified as being part of a larger language family, as happened with the Yanyuwa language of northern Australia, now placed in the Pama–Nyungan family. Since linguists do not always agree on whether a genetic relationship has been demonstrated, it is often disputed whether a particular language is an isolate.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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This process of composition is sometimes found in its incipient stage—a stage in which the component words are temporarily united to signify some unnamed object, and do not (from lack of frequent use) permanently cohere. But in the majority of inferior languages, the process of “agglutination,” as it is called, has gone far enough to produce considerable stability in the compound words: there is a manifest…
Herbert Spencer, First Principles
States what Language isolate is.
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This is indicated primarily by the fact that these languages lack what we would call grammatical categories. As regards this point, Westermann's grammar of the Ewe language is in entire agreement with the much earlier results which Steinthal reached in his investigation of the Manda language, which is also of the Soudan region. These languages consist of monosyllabic words which follow one another in direct…
Wilhelm Max Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
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It may be said to be, at once, both what the logicians call, a singular, and what they call, a common term; and to join, in its signification the seemingly opposite qualities of the most precise individuality and the most extensive generalization. This word, therefore, expressing so very abstract and metaphysical an idea, would not easily or readily occur to the first formers of language. What are called the…
Adam Smith, The Essays of Adam Smith
States what Language isolate is.
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