List of Oral Language Isolates By Continent
Below is a list of known language isolates, arranged by continent, along with notes on possible relations to other languages or language families.
- In the Status column, "vibrant" means that a language is in full use by the community and being acquired as a first language by children. "Moribund" means that a language is still spoken, but only by older people; it is not being acquired by children, and without efforts to revive it will become extinct when current speakers die. "Extinct" means a language is no longer spoken. The terms "living" and "endangered" are defined by the classification of "Language Types" in ISO 639-3; "vibrant" is equivalent to "living" or sometimes "endangered" in ISO, depending on efforts to preserve the language, and "moribund" is "endangered" in ISO.
Read more about this topic: Language Isolate
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—Janet Frame (b. 1924)
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—Robert M. Fresco, and Jack Arnold. Dr. Matt Hastings (John Agar)
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—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)
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—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
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—H.A.L. (Herbert Albert Laurens)