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Day Translations is a company that is actively engaged in the preservation of languages. This is a quote from the company’s founder:

“I’m working towards my dream of promoting peace through education, tolerance and cultural awareness”

– Sean Hopwood, President & CEO

Language isolates are defined as languages that have evolved independently and that have no links to other languages. Sometimes language isolates are referred to as “relic languages” due to the fact that have an ancient history. They have no descendant languages and no genealogical relationship with other languages.

In contrast, language families are groups of languages that have common origins and a clear, linear succession.

Examples of Language Isolates

Basque Language

The most common and well known example of language isolates in the European continent is Basque, which is spoken in Spain’s Basque Country located on the West border between Spain and France. What is particularly interesting about the Basque language is that it is completely unrelated to other Indo-European languages. Structurally it is an “agglutinative language”, which means that it is “sticky”: in other words, it sticks together different components called morphemes or meaningful elements. Agglutinative languages tend to be more flexible and they include Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian, Swahili, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian and Quechua.

Currently about 500,000 people speak Basque in the North-West region of Spain as well as in South-West France.

The first written forms of Basque language were found around the year 1000.

Sumerian Language

Another famous example is the Sumerian language which was spoken around 3100 years BC in the Mesopotamia region (currently equivalent to today’s Iraq and parts of Turkey and Syria) and early written records were found around the year 2500 BC. While the Mesopotamian influence extended to other countries such as Egypt, the Sumerian language was spoken only by a small proportion of the population.

The Sumerian language became extinct during the first century AD, but it was rediscovered by archeologists in the 1800s.

Ket Language

The Ket language can be found in Siberia that is still being spoken today and it’s a remnant of the Yeniseian group of languages.

While scholars have been debating whether Ket is an isolate or not based on the fact that it used to belong to a family of languages, what’s important to remember about it is that it has survived and the other languages associated with it haven’t.

Language Isolates in Summary

Language isolates are separate from unclassified languages for which we don’t have enough information such as written records. Extinct languages often belong to the unclassified category.

Experts have been compiling lists of language isolates and have grouped them according to their geographical regions: there are 10 language isolates in Africa, 9 in Asia, 7 in Australia, 14 in Oceania, 1 (possibly more) in Europe, 20 in North America, 6 in Mexico and 55 (or more) in South America. Under this categorisation, Korean is considered a language isolate. The regions with the most instances of language isolates include Papua New Guinea and Brazil.