Being different from "other similar languages" mostly just means a history involving more being conquered than conquering.

But, even middle-of-Europe Hungarian is related - somewhat - to Khanty and Mansi, and to a lesser extent to Finnish.

I just think it's kind of incredible when a language exists in the center of Europe in 2021 that isn't quite related to anything.

Armenian and Greek qualify as well, but they're much more prominent than Albanian - so, less mysterious :-)

Presumably, one factor is being "prisoners of Geography" (expression of Tim Marshall).

See the map https://decolonialatlas.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/raised-r...

from Anton Balazh ( https://www.shutterstock.com/g/antartis?irgwc=1&utm_medium=A... ),

...Hungary is in a way a protected "Inner Carpathia".

Also quite visible on OpenTopoMap, https://opentopomap.org/#map=6/46.800/19.116

> I just think it's kind of incredible when a language exists in the center of Europe in 2021 that isn't quite related to anything.

But we just stipulated that Albanian is an Indo-European language. It's much more closely related to the general run of European languages than Magyar or Finnish is. The language isolate in Europe is Basque.

Perhaps a better way to say it is "it's so impossible to understand, I can't believe it's actually related to anything" :-)

The largest one is likely Korean.

Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_language#Classificati...