Language isolate

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...