The languages with no relatives

Most European languages belong to one family and can be traced back to a common ancestor spoken somewhere north of the Black Sea five or six thousand years ago. A handful cannot, and where they sit on the map is a good guide to where Europe's oldest survivals are.

Basque is the extreme case: a language isolate with no demonstrated relatives anywhere on earth, spoken across the western Pyrenees, and almost certainly there before Indo-European arrived. It has survived Rome, Visigoths, Franks, Castile, and a twentieth-century state that banned it, and it is now spoken by more young people than it was fifty years ago.

Hungarian and Finnish are relatives of each other and of nothing else nearby — Finno-Ugric, arriving from the east at different times. The relationship is real but distant enough that a Hungarian and a Finn share about as much vocabulary as an English speaker shares with a Persian one. Estonian, closer to Finnish, is mutually semi-comprehensible on a good day and about football.

Georgian has its own alphabet, invented in the fifth century, and belongs to a Kartvelian family confined to the Caucasus. Albanian is Indo-European but forms a branch entirely on its own, with no close relatives at all, which is the linguistic signature of a very long time in one difficult place.

This matters to a traveller for a practical reason and an interesting one. The practical reason is that in these countries you will not be able to guess a single word, and the usual European trick of half-recognising a menu fails completely. The interesting one is that language isolates cluster in the places that were hardest to conquer and least worth conquering — mountains, marshes, edges.

Learning six words is disproportionately effective in exactly these countries, because nobody expects a visitor to have bothered. Kaixo, köszönöm, kiitos, gamarjoba, faleminderit.

Say one of them and watch what happens to the conversation.