Questions tagged [language-isolates]
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Are there languages that are only demonstrably related within the same family by looking at other languages in the same family?
What I mean is whether there are known languages which, when compared between only themselves, cannot be conclusively shown to be within the same family, but which can be shown to be related when &...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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? ...
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