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Some languages became isolates in historical times, after all their known relatives became extinct. The Pirahã language of Brazil is one such example, the last surviving member of the Mura family. Others, like Basque, have been isolates for as long as their existence has been documented.
Language isolates may be seen as a special case of unclassified languages, being languages which remain unclassified even after extensive efforts. If eventually such efforts do prove fruitful, a language previously considered an isolate may no longer be considered one; and since linguists do not always agree on whether a genetic relationship has been demonstrated, it is often disputed whether a language constitutes a true isolate or not.
The term "genetic relationship" is meant in the sense of historical linguistics, which claims that almost all languages spoken in the world today can be grouped by derivation from common ancestral languages into a relatively small number of families. Thus, for example, English is related to other Indo-European languages, and Mandarin to many other Sino-Tibetan languages. By this criterion, each language isolate constitutes a family on its own — which explains the exceptional interest that those languages have received from linguists.
It is possible (though not certain) that all languages spoken in the world today are genetically related, by descent from a single ancestral tongue; the established language families would then be only the upper branches of the genealogical tree of all languages. For this reason, isolate languages have been the object of numerous studies seeking to uncover their genealogy. Thus, for instance, Basque has been compared with every living and extinct language family known, from SumerianThe Sumerian language of ancient Sumer was spoken in Southern Mesopotamia from at least the 4th millennium BC. Sumerian was replaced by Akkadian as a spoken language around 2000 BC, but continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial and scientific language to the South CaucasianThe South Caucasian languages also called Georgian or Kartvelian are spoken primarily in Georgia, with smaller groups of speakers in Turkey, Iran, Azerbaijan, Russia, Ukraine and other countries. It includes the following languages: Georgian Kartuli : the — without conclusive results.
There are some situations in which a language with no ancestor might arise. For example, if deaf parents were to raise a group of hearing children who have no contact with others until adulthood, they might develop a verbal language among themselves and keep using it later, teaching it to their children, and so on; eventually it could develop into the full-fledged language of a population. Such a situation is not very likely to occur at any one time, but looking at tens of thousands of years of human history plus pre-history, the likelihood of this occurring at least a few times increases.
One should not confuse the concept of a language isolate with a language whose speakers are isolated in some sense, e.g. because they have little contact with other cultures (like the language of Easter IslandEaster Island ( Polynesian: Rapa Nui ("Great Rapa"), Spanish: Isla de Pascua is an island in the south Pacific Ocean belonging to Chile. Administratively it is a province of the Chilean region of Valparaiso, although it is located 3,515 km (2,185 miles) w), or because they live far away from the regions where related languages are spoken (like the Malagasy languageMalagasy is the westernmost member of the Austronesian language family, spoken on Madagascar where it is an official language. It has the highly unusual Verb Object Subject typology. The orthography is comparable to English. i' is always pronounced 'ee', of MadagascarSee also Madagascar (movie) Madagascar is an island nation in the Indian Ocean, off the eastern coast of Africa. Madagascar is the 4th largest island in the world. It is the home of five percent of the world's plant and animal species, 80 per cent of them, whose closest relatives are spoken in Southeast AsiaSoutheast Asia is a subregion of Asia. It includes all of the following territories: Brunei Cambodia East Timor Indonesia Laos Malaysia Myanmar (Burma) Philippines Singapore Thailand Vietnam Southeast Asia has an area of 1. 6 million sq miles (4,000,000 k). These two languages are definitely not isolates.