Editing Language family (section)

=== Isolates ===
{{main|Language isolate}}
Most of the world's languages are known to be related to others. Those that have no known relatives (or for which family relationships are only tentatively proposed) are called [[language isolate]]s, essentially language families consisting of a single language. There are an estimated 129 language isolates known today.<ref name=":0">{{cite journal|last=Campbell |first=Lyle |date=24 August 2010 |title=Language Isolates and Their History, or, What's Weird, Anyway? |journal=Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society |language=en |volume=36 |issue=1 |pages=16–31 |doi=10.3765/bls.v36i1.3900 |issn=2377-1666 |doi-access=free}}</ref> An example is [[Basque language|Basque]]. In general, it is assumed that language isolates have relatives or had relatives at some point in their history but at a time depth too great for linguistic comparison to recover them.

A language isolate is classified based on the fact that enough is known about the isolate to compare it genetically to other languages but no common ancestry or relationship is found with any other known language.<ref name=":0" />

A language isolated in its own branch within a family, such as [[Albanian language|Albanian]] and [[Armenian language|Armenian]] within Indo-European, is often also called an isolate, but the meaning of the word "isolate" in such cases is usually clarified with a [[Grammatical modifier|modifier]]. For instance, Albanian and Armenian may be referred to as an "Indo-European isolate". By contrast, so far as is known, the [[Basque language]] is an absolute isolate: it has not been shown to be related to any other modern language despite numerous attempts. A language may be said to be an isolate currently but not historically if related but now extinct relatives are attested. The [[Aquitanian language]], spoken in Roman times, may have been an ancestor of Basque, but it could also have been a sister language to the ancestor of Basque. In the latter case, Basque and Aquitanian would form a small family together. Ancestors are not considered to be distinct members of a family.{{citation needed|date=April 2023}}