Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2025 August 6

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August 6

Language almost-isolate

Is there an established term for what I can only think of as "language almost-isolates"? I'm meaning something like Greek — it's not a language isolate because it's Indo-European, but it consists of its own language family, without any close relatives, without any relatives that aren't closer than the entirety of Indo-European. To borrow something from biology, I'm thinking of something like Gingko biloba, which is not an isolate (a separate kingdom) but almost so (it's the only species in its division), and therefore not really related to any other plants except on the kingdom level. Nyttend (talk) 22:48, 6 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Language_isolate#Genetic_relationships uses the term family-level isolates, and mentions Armenian. The article Armenian language describes that language as the sole member of the independent branch.  Card Zero  (talk) 08:33, 7 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

On a related note, there's also "family isolates", smaller language families with only one language majorly spoken or so, but no proven connections to any other families. Notably the Japonic languages. (A possible connection to the Koreanic languages might not be implausible, but there hasn't been found any systematic correspondences in the core vocabulary.) 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 11:52, 7 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]