Talk:Language isolate

UNESCO Atlas of Languages in Danger

I just updated the link which was provided to this resource with an archival url because the page no longer exists, at least, not at the given address. Following the link rot repair process, I simply added an archive which was taken 3 years ago, but only a day after the link was retrieved. (This is, as far as I know, the right thing to do almost always)

That said, I wanted to say a little more than the edit summary space allows. I don't know why UNESCO isn't hosting the resource they did at the same address anymore, however, when the title of the resource is entered into a search engine, a book of the same title by the same publisher is available freely online at a different page belonging to the same host. This book, as far as I can tell, is not an equivalent to what the original link's content.

The Atlas, on the day the user accessed it was populated with over 2000 entries and many features which the archive doesn't preserve. The latest archive I found that still worked is from 2023 and the site was massively updated in that time. That version in my estimation is vastly more useful and accessible as a resource.

I don't believe UNESCO would stop supporting what was an incredibly important and useful database, yet the page is a 404 error now. The top search results are for a digital book of just over 200 pages.

Someone better informed or more experienced with Wikipedia editing and a healthy interest in linguistics would be doing a great service by addressing this in some way. It is possible that the site underwent maintenance or restructuring and the content is being hosted elsewhere on their server. It's possible that it is only temporarily removed, but I don't think that's the case, as some later archives redirected to a page which wasn't the same resource.

If I were to make a call, I'd think that the later archive is the best thing, but maybe it got removed for some inaccurate information, and again, I only wanted to help in the way I knew was right. This is beyong my editorial experience and I don't have the time to devote more than this post.

Thank you for reading, and if I missed something obvious, thank you for getting it right. I love Wikipedia (and language) and want to see it at its best! Iiviigames (talk) 04:18, 29 December 2024 (UTC)

Isolate vs. unclassified

We say: "Unclassified languages are different from language isolates in that they have no demonstrable genetic relationships to other languages due to a lack of sufficient data."

I believe (but I may be wrong; I'm far from being an expert) that most lingusits agree with the following: All languages may be related, but that is pure speculation, not science, as we have no data to prove or disprove links tens of thousands of years back. The science of lingustics deals with relationships that can be demonstrated, or at least shown to be plausible based on similarities, or on differences that can be accounted for by plausible mechanisms of language change. As such, the Altaic hypothesis is fringe science, but so is claiming that Turkish and Japanese do not share a common ancestor - we simply do not know.

If this is correct, there is no real difference between isolates and unclassified languages - or perhaps a difference of degree (based on how much data we do have) rather than one of kind. Nø (talk) 07:21, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

Isolates have been described well enough to determine they do not belong, at least, within nearby language groups (Basque is clearly not Romance, Sumerian is clearly not Semitic, etc.). This is not a conclusion that can be drawn for unclassified languages. If you look over out list in Unclassified language, it is full of suggestive possible relationships. The methodological problem is that even when some words in some language like Rouran could be identified as being from Mongolic or Turkic, it doesn't securely rule out a hypothesis of an "unrelated" language (i.e. one from a different, otherwise extinct family) that had some loanwords in it. There are cautionary examples on this kind of situation, such as the earliest known material of Hungarian being tribe / clan names of mainly Turkic loanword origin.

We duly note in the lede that the isolate / unclassified boundary is fuzzy, but it would be valuable to add (with citations, not as WP:OR) discussion of the fact that "classification as an isolate" depends on this kind of negative evidence for other reasonably conceivable classifications. --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 14:52, 27 August 2026 (UTC)

Akajeru: death of speakers does not make a language an isolate

Regarding Akajeru of India, the article currently says "Language isolate as of 2020 after the last speaker of Akachari died of tuberculosis." Not sure what was meant. A language can have 100,000 speakers and be an isolate, or a language can have no speakers left but still be classified. For example, Hittite has no speakers, but it was not and is not an isolate. I hope an editor who understands the Akajeru situation can improve this. Pete unseth (talk) 19:35, 24 May 2025 (UTC)

Map bad in dark mode

First map is a disaster if the user has set dark mode in preferences. Jidanni (talk) 15:17, 27 May 2026 (UTC)

The map had |class=skin-invert-image. This often helps make images more suitable for dark mode, but in this case it was just making it black on black, making the landmasses invisible and the map illegible. I've removed the inversion, though the poor contrast between the white background and very pale landmasses makes the map difficult to read whether you have dark mode enabled (as I do) or not. I suspect the problem is the actual image on Commons has a transparent background with white landmasses; the white landmasses don't work well with either light or dark mode. A map with better contrast would definitely be helpful here. – Scyrme (talk/solidarity) 21:02, 15 August 2026 (UTC)

If anyone does decide to update the map, more examples would also be nice. The current version lacks any examples from South America or Oceania. – Scyrme (talk/solidarity) 21:10, 15 August 2026 (UTC)