What is a Language Isolate, and how do they come about?
To study languages more effectively, linguists classify them into various groups according to different characteristics. One such classification is a genetic (genealogical) classification that unites languages into language families.
A language family is a grouping of linguistically connected languages that originate from a common ancestral mother-language called the ‘proto-language’. Like people who belong to the same family, related languages share similar features: there is some shared vocabulary, the basic grammatical principles are often similar. They can even be mutually intelligible to a degree.
However, not all languages belong to this or that language family. Some languages remain unclassified, usually because there is simply not enough information available to decide which family they belong to. Some of those languages are language isolates. Let us take a more detailed look at them.
To learn more about language families, check out part one of this article.
What are Language Isolates?
According to definitions.net, a language isolate is:
‘a natural language with no demonstrable genealogical relationship with other languages; that is, one that has not been demonstrated to descend from an ancestor common with any other language’.
Or, to put it another way, a language isolate is a language family consisting of one single language.
It’s highly probable that all human languages share a common origin if we could trace them back far enough in time, but the problem is that linguists can’t look that far into the past with certainty. The oldest written records only go back around 5,500 years, and the earliest language reconstruction, Proto-Afroasiatic, is thought to date to about 10,000 years ago (and that reconstruction is questionable). The most thoroughly reconstructed language family is Proto-Indo-European, usually estimated to be about 8,000 years old. Beyond this point, the evidence becomes too limited for reliable reconstruction.
Language isolates offer unique windows into linguistic history that other languages cannot. They preserve traces of what a region’s linguistic landscape might have looked like before the spread of larger languages or families. For instance, Sandawe is a language isolate and a click language spoken in East Africa. This is unusual because most click languages are found in southern African today. This suggests that Sandawe may be a holdover from an earlier time, before the expansion of Bantu languages, when click-speaking populations were more widespread across Sub-Saharan Africa.
How does a language become an isolate?
One theory is that a language has developed independently of other languages, however it is more likely that a language isolate is the last surviving language of an unidentified language family. One of the major historical factors behind this was the Agrarian, or Neolithic, Revolution, when people shifted from hunting and gathering to farming and permanent settlement. This transition began roughly 12,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, though it occurred at different times around the globe.
With the rise of farming communities and, eventually, large urban centres, some languages gained far more speakers than before. These dominant languages gradually replaced smaller local ones. Estimates suggest that before agriculture, the world may have had as many as 20,000 distinct languages, compared to about 7,200 still spoken today.
Language loss continues in the modern era, and the colonial period greatly accelerated this decline. However, the number of new isolates created during colonial expansion was smaller than during the Neolithic transition. The reason is that by the time of European colonisation, linguists had begun documenting languages more systematically. This made it easier to recognise related languages and classify them into families — unless, of course, a language had already become an isolate before European contact.
Related topic: Why Some Languages are Dying — and how we can Save Them
What language isolates are there?
Determining a language’s genetic connections is a complicated matter which involves a lot of research, analysing historical data and written records. Linguists have different approaches to this, and there is no universal agreement on what languages can be considered isolates. However, usually linguists would compare it to other (usually geographically close) languages for anything that could trace it to an existing or extinct ancestral language. This can include grammar structure, phonology, shared history, and more. However, it’s important to note that shared, or loan words don’t equate to a shared language family.
Although scholars debate the causes and consequences, geography clearly plays a role in shaping language development, as shown by the distribution of language isolates. Regions such as the west coast of North America, the Amazon rainforest, and the southern edge of the Sahara in Africa are known for their high numbers of isolates. Papua New Guinea, however, stands out above all others, with an astonishing 839 languages, including nine isolates on its own.
That said, one common example of a language isolate is the Basque language, Euskara. Although Basque is spoken in Europe — in areas of Spain and France — it is not an Indo-European language. Basque is not related to any other known languages spoken today. At present, the Basque language is considered to be the last surviving language isolate in Europe.
The classification also may change over time. Some languages that were considered isolates have been re-classified after more data becomes available, and connections are established. For instance, the Japanese language was thought to be a language isolate, until researchers discovered its relationship to Ryukyuan languages in the southern islands of the Japanese archipelago. They now form the Japonic language family together.
Korean is the most spoken language isolate by a wide margin with more than 75 million speakers worldwide. It’s the official language of both North Korea and South Korea, although there are some linguistic divergences, resulting in two major dialects. The Korean language is now believed by some researchers to be a member of Altaic language family (which includes Mongolian and Turkish). However, others do not recognise this family and still believe Korean to be a language isolate.
Due to the differences in opinions and approaches, it is impossible to say how many language isolates there are in total. The numbers range from 75 to 129.
Final thoughts
For many years, language isolates have presented a puzzling mystery for linguists to try and uncover, and they probably will for many more years to come. New developments are possible, after all — Japanese has found its family members fairly recently.
Researchers always hope to discover new written records, or a new approach to analysis can yield more conclusive data. However, it is also quite possible that many languages will always remain isolates, a language family of one.