Linguistic isolates

Q. What are linguistic isolates

A. Literally, languages that have no recognised family relationship to any other living or known historical language.

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Q. As distinct from

A. Most languages belong to groups, or families, of languages with which they have something in common: their relatives. English, for example, belongs to the western group of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family; whereas Mandarin belongs to the Chinese branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. And these families can be huge. For example, Indo-European languages are spoken by about half of the world's population, and they include languages that you might not normally associate with one another, such as Welsh and Persian..

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Q. So, isolates

A. Some languages appear to be orphans with no links to any other languages. These have grammatical, stylistic and cultural features which no other language on earth appears to share.

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Q. How did these isolates come about

A. The short answer is that no one really knows. What are now isolates may have once had relatives, and many languages considered to be isolates today may one day be proved not to be. This is because languages, which have not been studied properly, or which are nearly extinct, may share links with others which have not yet been found.

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An example of this is Ket, spoken by a few thousand people in Siberia. This language was for many years thought to be an isolate but actually turns out to have had a few relatives - Arin, Assan and Kott - which all died in the 18th century. So Ket is an isolate in that it has no living relatives; but, in the true sense, it isn't an isolate because it once had a family.

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Korean, a much larger language, was also once thought to be an isolate, but most linguists now accept that it is part of the Altaic language family, and therefore very distantly related to Turkish, Mongolian and Kazakh.

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Q. What living examples are there

A. Basque is a language spoken by about 660,000 people in northern Spain and south-west France. Europe's only living isolate, theories abound as to its history, many linguists theorising that it may be a living remnant of a language or group of languages spoken in Iberia before the Romans moved in. Some scholars have even tried to link it to Etruscan - a Classical linguistic isolate - the ancient language of central Italy, but without success.

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Japanese is a favourite for linguists, who are always trying to find links between Japanese and other languages, but they have never come anywhere close. Amazingly, for such a huge language - there are 120 million speakers of Japanese, the world's biggest isolate - Japanese is unrelated to any other language, although it does have some borrowings from Chinese.

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Haida is a language of Alaska and British Columbia, with 350 speakers.

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Hadza is spoken by 200 hunter-gatherers in Southern Tanzania.

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The four above are among the better known examples. There are plenty of others, mostly - unlike Basque and Japanese - spoken by dwindling numbers of people in remote areas of the globe. This means that they are usually under threat from the influence of larger and more widespread languages. Inevitably, many will die out before they are ever studied or recorded properly and before their isolation can ever be determined as true or not.

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By Simon Smith