The goal of this workshop is to evaluate the linguistic status of African languages called “Isolates”. Are they “truly” isolates (with no relation to any of the four ”traditional” linguistic families present on the African continent? Are they “isolates” within a linguistic family with no clear connection with other sub-branches? Do they have different levels of linguistic structures (lexical, morphological, syntactic) which suggest strong contacts between different linguistic families? This workshop was funded by an ANR research grant CLHASS (“Linguistic contributions to the History of Sub-Saharan Africa”, Principal Investigator: Jean-Marie Hombert)