Why is Korean considered a language isolate?

Question

According to the Wikipedia article on Koreanic languages:

Among extant languages, Korean is considered by most linguists to be a language isolate and by others as part of the widely rejected Altaic family or the Dravido-Korean languages.

And the Wikipedia article on [the Altaic family] states that:

Altaic (/ælˈteɪ.ᵻk/) is a proposed language family of central Eurasia, now widely seen as discredited.

Yet from my personal experience living in Japan, Japanese and Korean seem very close. Korean speakers tend to learn Japanese very quickly, and the usual explanations given are because they are very similar languages, or because they have similar grammars.

Moreover, I speak Japanese, and I usually recognize Korean when I hear it because I always think it is Japanese being spoken until I realize that I don't understand what is being said.

So why aren't Japanese and Korean considered part of the same group? Why is the Altaic hypothesis dismissed? Why is Korean considered an Isolate?

Answer 1

Remember "isolate" doesn't mean "shown to be unrelated to any other language". It means "not shown to be related to any other language" (in a sufficiently convincing manner to establish a consensus).

Basically, Korean is considered a language isolate because modern linguists expect relatedness to be demonstrated by showing there is a significant amount of vocabulary (possibly including morphemes, not just entire words) in each language that can be derived from a common source via a regular set of sound changes for each language.

Figuring out these sound changes, and determining the form of the common vocabulary, is the process of reconstructing a Proto-language.

For Japanese and Korean, despite the superficial similarities, nobody has constructed a convincing proto-language. Wikipedia mentions some of the criticisms of proposed Altaic sound correspondences between languages.

There are good reasons for requiring evidence of common vocabulary. Areal effects have a large influence on the pronunciation of languages, and they can also affect grammar.

For example, the Basque language doesn't have any common ancestry with Spanish, as far as we can tell, and if it did they certainly must have diverged far earlier than Spanish and Romanian. However, Spanish pronunciation shares some features with Basque that it doesn't share with Romanian:

• Spanish and some dialects of Basque have 5-vowel systems /a e i o u/. (Some Basque varieties have vowel systems more similar to French, with /y/ and nasal vowels. This is another example of areal effects.) Romanian has 7 main vowels /a e i o u ə ɨ/.
• Spanish and Basque contrast a trilled rhotic /r/ and a tapped/flapped rhotic /ɾ/. Romanian has a single rhotic phoneme /r/.
• Basque and some varieties of Spanish have the retracted sibilant [s̺].

An example of an areal grammar feature is the "have"-perfect in Western European languages. The verbs involved (reflexes of Germanic *habjaną and Latin habeo) are not cognates, so it's impossible for the structure to be inherited from a common ancestor.

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As Midas points out, different people have different viewpoints, and "dismissed" probably has an overly strong connotation of a final judgement. It's appropriate for Wikipedia and any other source trying to be "neutral" or conservative to classify Korean as an isolate, since the mainstream view (apparently; I'm not an expert) is that it has not yet been shown to be related to any other language group with a high degree of certainty. But different linguists have different leanings toward "splitting" languages apart or "lumping" them together. It's possible and perfectly legitimate for someone to think the languages are likely to be related even though we can't definitively demonstrate it yet.

Answer 2

My mother tongue is Chinese and I speak neither Japanese nor Korean yet I don't think they really sound close. I will definitely not mistake Japanese speakers as speaking Korean.

It's very easy for "close" languages to borrow and share a lot of features. An example I remember quite well is the pronunciation of "r" in became quite similar in French and German over time (for a lot words at least), even though those languages fundamentally don't have much to do with each other, however that doesn't make them belong to one language family.

So the issue in a large part is how do you separate features borrowed from neighboring, but essentially unrelated languages from features that stemmed from a common language family. It's true that Japanese and Korean share certain common features (e.g. grammar) between themselves and also with some other languages in the area, for example Manchu Language, but the sources of such similarities are debated.

Also, the Altaic hypothesis is largely based on the idea that a large portion of the ancestors of modern Korean and Japanese came from north/northeastern Asia (and then they mixed with the population coming from further south to form their respective races), which might be true to a large extent. However, even if that's true, since the geographical conditions of those two places were largely isolating (especially Japan), and also since there were another large portion of the population who came from completely different places (e.g. from Southeastern Asian islands in the case of Japan), they might well have developed a lot of their own features during the tens of thousands of years so that it would be hard to still classify them as belonging to the same language family. Apparently all human beings eventually came from the same place... So at what point of a language's evolution do you draw the line on language families is a somehow subjective issue actually.

Answer 3

The Altaic hypothesis is far from dismissed. There are publications out there regarding the Altaic family and there are still voices within major institutions (e.g. Brill) speaking of it. Wikipedia as a source for linguistic concensus has deteriorated over the past years. I am not for or pro the Altaic hypothesis, I am just stating that "dismissed" is largely exhagerated. You could say that the Altaic hypothesis containing Turkic, Mongolian and Tungusic is far more accepted than the Macro-Altaic hypothesis including Japanese and Korean.

Answer 4

Combined with molecular anthropology, these language families have one super cognate"eye". Tai-Kadai:mata Austronesian:mata Austroasiatic:mat Japonic:ma Hmong-Mien:muejh Sino-Tibetan:muk

Mogolian:nud nivkh:nangay Koreanic:nun