31 juillet 2026 · Korean
It will be Korean
A language with no known relatives was needed. Two candidates, one place — and an argument that finally decided it.
Basque told a story of survival: a language settled in western Europe before the Indo-European ones, which watched them all arrive and is still there. Its ergativity forces you to rethink what a subject is, and its printed literature begins in 1545 with a book that shouts at its own language to come out of the house.
Korean tells a story of invention: in 1443 a king had an alphabet designed for his language and wrote down, in black and white, why. Hangul is the only writing system in the world whose author, date and intention are known — and whose letters imitate the position of the organs that pronounce them.
That last point settled it. The book already speaks at length of obscure origins and reconstructed descent; what it lacked was the opposite case, a script entirely deliberate, dated, signed. Korean gives both at once: the isolate that forbids comparison, and the alphabet that was thought out.
Basque does not disappear for all that: it stays in the timeline, and its sentence from 1545 remains the best definition we have of a minoritised language.