Euskara, spoken across the western Pyrenees, is the great European example and the last survivor of a pre-Indo-European Europe
Basque, with roughly 750,000 speakers; connected to the ancient Aquitanian inscriptions
General knowledge · Words & language
Language isolates
A standing problem of classification
Language families — the languages with no relatives
Languages with no demonstrable genealogical relationship to any other: families of one. Basque is the celebrated European case, the last survivor of whatever was spoken in western Europe before Indo-European arrived; Sumerian, Elamite and Etruscan are ancient ones that can be read but not placed; Ainu, Burushaski, Kusunda and Zuni are living ones. The label is a statement about evidence rather than about origins, and it is provisional: a language counts as one only until somebody proves a relative, or until its last speaker dies.
How to spot them
- ▸Euskara, the Pyrenees, and a language older than Indo-European in western Europe
- ▸Sumerian: written for three thousand years and related to nothing
- ▸The grouping of Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic that most linguists have abandoned
- ▸Japanese does not qualify, because of Ryukyuan
Key facts
Written in cuneiform for three thousand years, read fluently by scholars, and related to nothing else on earth
Sumerian
The proposed grouping of Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic, now generally explained as long contact rather than common descent
The Altaic hypothesis; most specialists now treat the resemblances as a Sprachbund
Spoken in Hokkaido and formerly in Sakhalin and the Kurils, with a great body of oral epic
Ainu, the yukar epics; now critically endangered
Spoken in the Hunza and Yasin valleys of Gilgit-Baltistan, surrounded by Indo-Iranian and Sino-Tibetan neighbours
Burushaski
Etruscan and Elamite: both can be read, and neither can be placed in any family
Etruscan is written in an alphabet borrowed from Greek, which is why it can be pronounced but not understood
Korean qualifies unless the speech of one southern island is counted as a separate language
Jeju, which if counted separately makes a small Koreanic family instead
Mapudungun in Chile, Zuni in New Mexico and Purépecha in Michoacán
Three of the Americas' best-known cases; the Americas have more than anywhere else
Key ideas
- Isolation is about proof, not antiquity. Every language has ancestors; an isolate is simply one whose relatives have all died out, or whose kinship cannot be demonstrated by the comparative method. Resemblances produced by borrowing and long neighbourliness — a Sprachbund — can look exactly like inheritance, which is what sank the Altaic proposal.
Quick-fire facts
- •Around 130 to 160 living isolates are generally recognised, depending on the classification used
- •Basque is the only one in Europe; its speakers call it Euskara and themselves Euskaldunak, 'speakers of Basque'
- •Basque is ergative, has no gender, and shows no regular sound correspondences with any Indo-European language
- •Sumerian was written from around 3200 BC and survived as a learned language long after it ceased to be spoken
- •Japanese is not an isolate: it forms the Japonic family with the Ryukyuan languages of Okinawa
- •Korean is usually listed as one, though Jeju is sometimes counted as a separate Koreanic language
- •The Altaic hypothesis grouped Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic, and in its Macro-Altaic form Korean and Japonic as well; it is now rejected by most historical linguists
- •Other well-known cases include Ainu, Burushaski, Kusunda in Nepal, Nihali in India, Hadza in Tanzania, Haida and Zuni in North America, and Seri in Mexico
- •New Guinea and Amazonia contain a disproportionate share of the world's isolates
- •Etruscan left thousands of short inscriptions, mostly funerary, and lent the Romans their alphabet
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Sources
- Lyle Campbell — Historical Linguistics: An Introduction
- David Crystal — The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language