Mirela
Language isolates are fascinating from both linguistic and localization perspectives. These languages, with no known relatives or linguistic family ties, stand apart from all the others. But does that uniqueness make them inherently harder to localize? Let’s explore the factors that may influence localization difficulty.
What is a language isolate?
A language isolate is defined as a language with no demonstrable genealogical relationship to any other living or extinct language. In simpler terms, it means linguists haven’t been able to prove that the language descends from a common ancestor with any other known language.
There are around 350 independent language families worldwide—including isolates—with no proven genetic link to any other family. Language isolates alone account for about 37% of these, representing over a third of global linguistic diversity.
Some well-known examples of language isolates include Basque (spoken in northern Spain and southwestern France), Ainu (an endangered language of northern Japan), Burushaski (Pakistan), and the now extinct Sumerian language. Korean too is classified as an isolate due to a lack of conclusive evidence tying it to a wider language family.
What would make language isolates harder to localize?
While it’s not accurate to say that all language isolates are inherently harder to localize, they do pose some challenges. When a language is related to others, you can often “borrow” terminology, concepts, or even phrasing during translation and localization. But with language isolates, you get no such shortcuts. So, if you were to localize a tech interface into Basque, it could be more complex than doing so for Galician (which is related to Spanish and Portuguese).
Translators rely on dictionaries and digital resources in their work. However, many isolates are spoken by small populations, so linguists are dealing with a lack of standardized terminology. Of course, this is not universally the case. Korean, while a language isolate, is a national language spoken by over 77 million people and enjoys a rich linguistic ecosystem.
Adding to their complexity is the fact that many isolates are agglutinative or polysynthetic. What this means is that they use complex word forms to convey what other languages might express with multiple words. Let’s look at Basque again as an example. A single word can encode subject, object, tense, mood, and more. This could pose difficulties when it comes to interface design, string length limits, and machine translation algorithms.
In the end, isolates receive less attention than other languages because companies are interested in return on investment. Larger communities with higher digital engagement are always prioritized. Without commercial demand, there’s little incentive to localize many of these languages.
Are they—or are they not?
Language isolates pose some challenges we might not run into in the case of languages with large families and wide global use. And it’s true that automatic translation systems, which rely heavily on large datasets and predictable grammar patterns, often struggle with isolates.
We can conclude that localizing for a language isolate can be a deeply rewarding process. It contributes to linguistic preservation, cultural inclusion, and technological equity. With the right tools, a great localization team, and respect for linguistic nuance, it’s not impossible to localize isolates.