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Newcyrus0910 (talk | contribs) →top: Alternative name for 'language isolate' is 'isolated language'. Tags: Mobile edit Mobile app edit Android app edit App section source |
→Genetic relationships: The mention of a sign language spontaneously arising in a section devoted to the evolution of spoken languages is misleading. It would be implausible to suppose Basque or Burushaski arose spontaneously, instead of all those languages identifiable as being their genetic relatives going extinct. Tags: references removed Mobile edit Mobile web edit |
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==Genetic relationships==
{{Main|Genetic relationship (linguistics)}}
A genetic relationship is when two different languages are descended from a common ancestral language.<ref name=":4">{{Cite book|last=Thomason|first=Sarah Grey|title=Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics|date=1988|others=Terrence Kaufman|isbn=0-520-07893-4|___location=Berkeley|oclc=16525266}}</ref> This is what makes up a [[language family]], which is a set of languages for which sufficient evidence exists to demonstrate that they descend from a single ancestral language and are therefore genetically related.<ref name=":1" /> For example, [[English language|English]] is related to other [[Indo-European languages]] and [[Mandarin Chinese]] is related to other [[Sino-Tibetan languages]]. By this criterion, each language isolate constitutes a family of its own.<ref name=":4" />
This is not to be confused with family-level isolates, which are not language isolates themselves but form a primary branch of a language family, such as [[Armenian language|Armenian]] within [[Indo-European languages|Indo-European]] and [[Paiwan language|Paiwan]] within [[Austronesian languages|Austronesian]].
==Extinct isolates==
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