Adult education teacher

What are language isolates?

By Pravar Mukkala

Language isolates are languages that don’t belong to any language family. Many language isolates are quickly becoming extinct, since not many people care to learn them and they aren’t similar to any other language.

Languages can be classified as part of a language family if there is enough proof that said language is descended from the proto-language of that family. For example, there is enough proof from human migrations and lexical and grammatical similarity that the languages in the Indo-European family are all related, despite being radically different today.


The most well-known language isolate is Basque, spoken in the autonomous community of País Vasco (literally meaning Basque Country in Spanish) and the department of Pyrénées-Atlantiques in France. Basque is surrounded by Indo-European languages, yet retains its own features. This
language is descended from one of the Pre-Indo-European languages of Europe, which were the languages spoken in Europe before the Indo-Europeans came along.

However, little to nothing is known about such a language family. Basque has fewer than one million native speakers.


Some other commonly cited isolates are:

Ainu, a language spoken in northern Japan,

Vedda, a language spoken in Sri Lanka,

Elamite, Sumerian, and Etruscan.

Of these, Ainu and Vedda are severely endangered, and Elamite, Sumerian, and Etruscan are all extinct languages that were spoken in ancient times.


Korean is also considered by some as a language isolate. Some linguists say that Jeju, a language/dialect related to Korean, is a dialect of Korean, making Korean a language on its own.


Others say that it’s a separate language, creating a Koreanic language family.


There have been many attempts to link language isolates with other languages and language families. One theory, called the Dené-Caucasian languages, suggests that Basque, the SinoTibetan languages, the North Caucasian languages, the Na-Dené languages of North America, the
Burushaski language of India and Pakistan, and the Yeneisian languages of Russia are descended from a common ancestor, despite speakers being spread out through the world. This theory has been rejected by most linguists, even though the grammar systems and simple vocabulary of the languages are somewhat similar.


There are about 130 isolates that we have identified, but this number is not cemented. A language distinguished as an isolate could be part of a family, or a language part of a family could be wrongly associated with it. Or maybe we haven’t discovered some languages yet. Who knows?


Now, this leads us to the topic of how languages evolved. Why is what we speak today exactly what we speak, and nothing else?

Arguing about the origin of languages?


There are two major theories: polygenesis and monogenesis. The root words poly- and monocome from Greek, and mean many and one. Genesis is also a Greek word, meaning creation or birth. So either all of the world’s natural spoken languages, including every family and isolate, came from one source, or they all came from different sources. Of course, there’s really no way to know, but we can theorise with all of the proof we can find.

Even though we have more than 7000 languages, the differences between languages are not limitless. All languages have consonant sounds and vowel sounds. All languages have words acting as nouns and verbs. All languages have noun and verb modifiers, adjectives, and adverbs. All languages have words that act as pronouns, like he, she, it, and they. All languages can phrase sentences as statements and interrogatives (example: He can do it becomes Can he do it? and in German Er kann das machen becomes Kann er das machen?).

Most languages also have similar sounds: despite being in different language families, Indonesian, Arabic and Hindi have similar sounds. Although there are aspirated consonants in many Indian languages, such as क and ख, which are Romanized as k and kh, and sounds in Arabic such as ع and غ which have to be Romanized as 3 and gh, all three have similar phonemes.


Many linguists reject this hypothesis – early humans may have invented languages as a way to warn others, or to convey simple sentences, and not to article complicated ideas. Language as we know it today may have evolved from different sources, from the simple languages spoken by humans who had already travelled around the world and settled in different places.