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A language isolate is a natural language that has no demonstrable genealogical (historical) relationship with any other language. This means it is not related to any other known language, living or dead, and cannot be grouped into a language family.12

An example of a language isolate is the Ikoot language. Isolating languages, which are often considered a type of analytic language, are characterized by having words that typically consist of a single morpheme. Classical Chinese and Vietnamese are examples of isolating languages. While typological classifications group languages by structural characteristics, such as isolating, agglutinating, or inflecting, this does not prove a genetic relationship between languages.132

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