No. 150

Orphans with no Families

Languages missing genetic relationships

You probably grew up with family members around you, closely related and more distant. With an analogy borrowed from our human family relationships, we say that most of the languages of the world are also related to each other in families.

Some idea of what the main language families of the world look like were offered in Miniature No. 38. The idea of language families has come up several other times, in Miniatures 104, 119 and 129.

But in human society we occasionally meet someone who does not seem to have any family members. Without pressing the analogy any farther, we can ask the simple question: are there languages that somehow escape the grouping into families, that do not seem to be related to any other?

Back at the dawn of recording of language 5,000 years ago, the very first we language we find in cuneiform texts from about 3100 B.C. has never been shown to be related to any other language ancient or modern. Sumerian was the language of high culture in Mesopotamia for a thousand years until it was replaced by Akkadian. Sumerian died out as a spoken language about 2000 B.C. but was studied in the school system for another 2000 years.

Probably the most mysterious of the ancient languages is Etruscan. Its origins and linguistic affiliation are still subjects of debate. It was spoken in Italy from about 700 B.C. until about 100 A.D., but though it continued to be studied by priests and scholars, it was no longer a living language at the time of Imperial Rome. Though many have tried, there seems to be no way to show conclusively that it is related to any other language in the world. Perhaps it was one of the Mediterranean languages that Indo-European speakers encountered on their arrival in Southern Europe (2000-3000 B.C.) And which over the millennia were completely replaced.

There are others long extinct, but they are languages that only historical linguists have even heard of. The most obvious question at this point is: Are there any languages around today that seem to have no relationship to any other language?

There are, and they are known as linguistic isolates. The most famous of these by far is Basque (native name Euskara) spoken by some 580,000 people mostly in Spain. It has never been shown to belong to any existing language family, though some have suggested that there is some connection to the Iberian languages of antiquity that the Romans encountered on the Iberian peninsula.

Burushaski is spoken by some 60,000 people in Pakistan and parts of India. It has not been definitely placed in any family, though there are said to be some affinities with Indo-European - perhaps the result of early contacts.

Ainu, spoken on Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan, was recently down to a handful of speakers and is probably extinct by now. The Ainu people have long been recognized as genetically and culturally distinct from the Japanese.

Two languages spoken in Eastern Siberia are neither related to each other or to any other languages. Yukaghir was recently down to less than 100 speakers, so it is also on the road to extinction. Gilyak is spoken by some 400 people, mostly older ones, while the younger prefer to speak Russian.

How about our own continent? A number of languages that were spoken in North America at the time of the arrival of Europeans have become extinct. There are at least four well-attested languages that have never been related to any other, and that became extinct in the 19th century. Of the many Native American languages still spoken in North America today, grouped into a number of families, three well-studied ones have not been shown to belong to any family.

Kutenai is spoken in the Northwest, mainly British Columbia and some in the U.S. But it is the all too familiar story again: the 100 speakers are all getting along in years and the young people are speaking only English.

The picture is brighter when we come to two that are part of the pueblo culture in the Southwest, mainly central New Mexico. Keres is spoken by about 8,000. In some pueblos, use of the language by all generations is vigorous, while in others the younger generation more and more prefers English. Zuni is spoken by around 6,500 including children, so it is vigorously alive in the community.

Many of the hundreds of languages in Central and South America are still poorly understood. Particularly in the latter, a number of languages in the Amazon region - too numerous to list here - have not been assigned to any family, so they too are tentatively considered isolates.

Does this sound like a lot of ‘orphans’? If we look all around the world we find fewer than 50 languages that don’t appear to be related to any family. The astonishing thing is not that there are so many but so few: if less than 1% of the world’s languages still escapes grouping into families, the achievement of classifying the other 99% is pretty impressive. And if we could just look farther back in time, we could probably take up even that 1% in our families and the superfamilies that were talked about in Miniature No. 38.

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