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A language isolate is a language that has no demonstrable genetic relationship with any other languages. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Basque in Europe, Ainu [ 1 ] in Asia, Sandawe in Africa, Haida and Zuni in North America, Kanoê in South America , Tiwi in Australia and Burushaski in Pakistan are all examples of such languages.
An isolating language is a type of language with a morpheme per word ratio close to one, and with no inflectional morphology whatsoever. In the extreme case, each word contains a single morpheme. Examples of widely spoken isolating languages are Yoruba [1] in West Africa and Vietnamese [2] [3] (especially its colloquial register) in Southeast Asia.
This article is a list of language families.This list only includes primary language families that are accepted by the current academic consensus in the field of linguistics; for language families that are not accepted by the current academic consensus in the field of linguistics, see the article "List of proposed language families".
Pages in category "Language isolates" This category contains only the following page. This list may not reflect recent changes. ...
Eurasiatic [3] is a hypothetical and controversial language macrofamily proposal that would include many language families historically spoken in northern, western, and southern Eurasia. The idea of a Eurasiatic superfamily dates back more than 100 years.
Thus, it is a language isolate. Ainu is sometimes grouped with the Paleosiberian languages, but this is only a geographic blanket term for several unrelated language families that were present in easternmost Siberia before the advances of Turkic and Tungusic languages there.
The Indigenous languages of Australia comprise numerous language families and isolates, perhaps as many as 13, spoken by the Indigenous peoples of mainland Australia and a few nearby islands. [3] The relationships between the language families are not clear at present although there are proposals to link some into larger groupings.
[1] [2] Thus language isolates such as Basque are necessarily autonomous. [2] Where several closely related varieties are found together, a standard language is autonomous because it has its own orthography, dictionaries, grammar books and literature. [2]