Is there a typological profile of isolates?
Across the linguistic literature, one occasionally encounters claims of typological differences
between isolates and non-isolates, but these are often vague, and tend to use isolates as proxies for small community
size, hunter-gatherer societies, and/or socially/geographically isolated languages. We compared the distribution of 89
phonological and morphosyntactic typological features between isolates and non-isolates using a worldwide sample of
215 languages (68 isolates vs. 147 non-isolates), in which we were unable to find a statistically significant
distinction. We discuss the relevance of our results for these claims, for the suggested proxy relationships between
isolates and other factors, and suggest possible avenues for future research.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Data and methodology
- 2.1Language sample
- 2.2Features
- 2.3Statistical methods
- 3.Results
- 4.Discussion and conclusion
- Supplementary materials
- Author contributions
-
Acknowledgements
-
Notes
-
References
-
Appendix
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