999: Language-Isolates Sep 3, 2017

Tomorrow's post at 5:30pm EST will be the 1000th Word Facts!

There is not any language that is necessarily easier or harder to learn for infants when they are first developing language-skills, though some linguists may claim polysynthetic languages like Greenlandic (Kalaallisut) are easier for children to understand. Nevertheless, once one learns a language, the difficulty of learning another depends upon how similar it is to one's first, or other languages with which that person is familiar. Finnish would be quite difficult to learn for an English speaker because the grammar and vocabulary is completely different, but it would be very hard for a speaker of Estonian. Some languages, however, are not related to any other at all, thereby making them generally hard to learn as a second language for anyone. Basque may be the most famous example of one, spoken in Spain and to a lesser extent in France, is regarded by most linguists to not be related to any other language. There are a few other language-isolates, such as Korean, which gain that status once all other languages in its particular languages become extinct, though there are some dead languages that are also considered isolates, like Sumerian. Unfortunately, because they are unrelated to other languages, it makes understanding the history of them difficult, as the standard comparative method of linguistics cannot be applied.