Is there a typological profile of isolates?

Vuillermet, Marine; Inman, David; Chousou-Polydouri, Natalia; Parker van Dam, Kellen; Easterday, Shelece; Rose, Françoise

Part of

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?

Marine Vuillermet | DCLS & ISLE University of Zürich

David Inman | DCLS & ISLE University of Zürich

Natalia Chousou-Polydouri | DCLS & ISLE University of Zürich

Kellen Parker van Dam | DCLS & ISLE University of Zürich

Shelece Easterday | Department of Linguistics University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

Françoise Rose | Laboratoire Dynamique Du Langage CNRS & Université Lumière Lyon 2

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
Acknowledgements
Notes
References
Appendix

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