We propose the following definition of language isolate: It's hard to find someone who understands the language, unless they've learned it natively. (This definition is different from the standard linguistic definition.) The following two conditions must both hold:
There is no large population of people who know a related language so who can sort of understand the first language. We leave undefined "large", "related", and "sort of understand". The Romance language family is an example of related languages.
There is little uptake of the language as a second language. For example, this eliminates Japanese as this kind of language isolate because many people learn it for anime and manga. This also eliminates languages which serve as a lingua franca, globally, regionally, or within a special field.
No comments :
Post a Comment