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Investigating Language Isolates: Typological and diachronic perspectives
Edited by Iker Salaberri, Dorota Krajewska, Ekaitz Santazilia and Eneko Zuloaga
[Typological Studies in Language 135] 2025
► pp. 22–47

Is there a typological profile of isolates?

ORCID logo | University of Zurich, Switzerland
ORCID logo | University of Zurich, Switzerland
ORCID logo | University of Zurich, Switzerland
ORCID logo | University of Zurich, Switzerland
ORCID logo | University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, United States of America
ORCID logo | Université Lyon 2, France
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.
Keywords: isolate, language family, typology, macroarea, statistical test
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
  • Author queries
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
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