Questions tagged [language-isolates]

The tag has no usage guidance.

Filter by
Sorted by
Tagged with
3 votes
0 answers
116 views

What language is most similar to Basque?

While Basque remains firmly a language isolate and AFAIK it's origins (along with that of the Basque people) remain shrouded in mystery, I wonder if there are any languages, living or dead, that ...
  • 157
0 votes
0 answers
26 views

How are directional morphemes used in Aikanã

Are directional morphemes in Aikanã attached to nouns or verbs? What is their function?
3 votes
1 answer
325 views

What happened to this isolate language of China?

This is a rather complicated and vague question because I have forgotten a lot about the circumstances where I learned about the language in question, specifically I have neither the reference book ...
6 votes
2 answers
353 views

Isolated language as null hypotheses?

When reading about rare or antique languages I often came across statements like "the most widespread / widely accepted theory is that it is an isolated language". You can read that for example in ...
5 votes
3 answers
1k views

Is the Fifa'a language of Saudi Arabia a dialect of Arabic or a separate language?

A Saudi friend on our sister site, travel.stackexchange.com, was just telling me there is an isolated language in his country called "Fifa'a", but that nothing is written about it on the internet as ...
  • 14.4k
3 votes
3 answers
814 views

Are there any language isolates in China?

I know there are many languages from many families besides just Mandarin Chinese and its close relatives within China. But I was wondering if China has at least one language isolate within its ...
  • 14.4k
15 votes
3 answers
1k views

Are there other pairs of languages that are as close grammatically despite not being in the same language family as Korean and Japanese?

Though there are many theories grouping Korean and Japanese in the same family, none of these are widely accepted by linguists. Yet the grammars of these two languages are extremely similar in many ...
  • 14.4k
24 votes
5 answers
6k views

How did Korean become a language isolate?

According to most linguists, Korean is a language isolate. Why doesn't it have any sister languages, like languages usually do? Why didn't it spread to other areas, or split into various languages? ...
  • 8,451