Isolated is not quite the same as unclassified
Seeing as there are between 6000 and
7000 languages in the world and most of them are only spoken by a small number of people in remote areas, there is still a lot of work to be done in classifying all human languages properly.
In the case of the most secluded languages, not enough data even exists to make the decision of which family they belong in, so many of them remain
unclassified. This, however, is somewhat different to being categorised as a language isolate. Although, it might very well turn out that some of the languages that today remain unclassified will someday discovered to also be language isolates.
What makes isolates different from the unclassifieds, however, is that in their case, plenty of data exists but it simply remains impossible to draw concrete conclusions. Although, as we’ll see later, sometimes breakthroughs do happen.
Conclusion – Language isolates remain a common mystery
It might seem peculiar to think that up to a third of the planet’s languages might not have any known relatives and no clear lineage, but that does seem to be the case. These numbers do make language isolates a rather big mystery. While some languages, like Japanese, do finally get successfully classified, the jury is still very much out on many of the other great language isolates.
However, it’s occasionally nice to come up against a riddle, even in this day and age. Their mystery does bring something distinctly Darwinian into the world of linguistics, clearly mirroring the never-ending quest for the missing link between both our biological and linguistic ancestors.