Unclassified languages are languages whose genetic affiliation has not been established, mostly due to lack of reliable data. The question of the genetic affiliation of languages belongs to the domain of historical linguistics. If this state of affairs continues even after intense study of the language and efforts to connect it to other languages, it is termed a language isolate. Languages can be considered unclassified for a variety of reasons, including:
Ethnologue: Unclassified languages (http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=40)
EBALL miscellenea (http://www.african.gu.se/maho/downloads/eballmanual.pdf) including section on African unclassified languages
This linguistics article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Unclassified_language&action=edit).
The languages of Australia (Aboriginal languages) and most of New Guinea (Papuan languages), however, are not part of this family.
The 237 Western Oceanic languages are spoken in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Indonesia.
In general, the Austronesian languages use affixes (suffixes, infixes, prefixes) attached to base words to modify the meaning or to indicate the function of the word in the sentence.
Malayalam is the principal language of Kerala state, on the south-western coast of India.
Since some of the minor Dravidian languages are spoken in the far north-east and north-west of India, linguists have reason to suppose that this family formerly covered a much greater area than it does today.
As a written language of learning, Sanskrit seems to have exerted strong influence even on the earliest known Dravidian language, and in the modern Malayalam, Kannada, and Telugu languages, Sanskrit loanwords retain the four distinctions between stop consonants that are characteristic of Indo-Aryan but not of Dravidian.
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