When linguists study a language, they try to trace its history backwards and connect it to other languages that developed from the same ancient ancestor.
But what happens when they can’t?
There are a small number of languages around the world that don’t appear to have any close relatives. Linguists call these language isolates. These are languages which seem to not be related to any other language currently spoken around the world.
In this episode, I want to explore this topic. What exactly is a language family? How do linguists decide whether two languages are related? What are some famous examples of a language isolate? And could some languages that we currently consider isolates actually have relatives that we simply haven’t discovered yet?
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