Language Isolates

Routledge Language Family

by Lyle Campbell (editor)

Language Isolates explores this fascinating group of languages that surprisingly comprise a third of the world’s languages. Individual chapters written by experts on these languages examine the world's major language isolates by geographic regions, with up-to-date descriptions of many, including previously unrecorded language isolates. Each language isolate represents a unique lineage and a unique window on what is possible in human language, making this an essential volume for anyone interested in understanding the diversity of languages and the very nature of human language. Language Isolates is key reading for professionals and students in linguistics and anthropology.

Genres: Linguistics

378 pages, Paperback

Published December 20, 2019

About the author

Lyle Richard Campbell is an American scholar and linguist known for his studies of indigenous American languages, especially those of Central America, and on historical linguistics in general. Campbell is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

The long-running "Routledge Language Family Surveys" series has presented brief introductions to the phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon of languages around the world, grouped together into volumes based on the overall families that these languages belong to. But what about those languages that are isolated, and it is impossible to place them into any recognized language family? Those languages are the topic of this volume in the series.

This book is rather inconsistent. That is, Basque, Ainu and Burushaski get dedicated chapters where each language is examined in some depth, but all the other isolates of the world are relegated to chapters titled “Language isolates in South America”, “Language isolates in New Guinea”, etc. In the latter chapters, the authors do little more than list the languages in the given region that are regarded as isolates, and gives some of the basic literature that anyone interested should turn to, but there is no room to really go into depth.