Eurasiatic languages

Eurasiatic
(widely rejected[1][2])
Geographic
distribution		Before the 16th century, most of Siberia and Western Eurasia; today worldwide
Linguistic classificationNostratic?
  • Eurasiatic
Proto-languageProto-Eurasiatic
Subdivisions
Language codes
GlottologNone
The worldwide distribution of the Eurasiatic macrofamily of languages according to Pagel et al.

Eurasiatic[3] is a hypothetical and controversial language macrofamily proposal that would include many language families historically spoken in northern, western, and southern Eurasia.

The idea of a Eurasiatic superfamily dates back more than 100 years. Joseph Greenberg's proposal, dating to the 1990s, is the most widely discussed version. In 2013, Mark Pagel and three colleagues published what they believe to be statistical evidence for a Eurasiatic language family.

The branches of Eurasiatic vary between proposals, but typically include the highly controversial Altaic macrofamily (composed in part of Mongolic, Tungusic and Turkic), Chukchi-Kamchatkan, Eskimo–Aleut, Indo-European, and Uralic—although Greenberg uses the controversial Uralic-Yukaghir classification instead. Other branches sometimes included are the Kartvelian and Dravidian families, as proposed by Pagel et al., in addition to the language isolates Nivkh, Etruscan and Greenberg's "Korean–Japanese–Ainu". Some proposals group Eurasiatic with even larger macrofamilies, such as Nostratic; again, many other professional linguists regard the methods used as invalid.

The hypothesis has fallen out of favour and has limited degrees of acceptance, predominantly among a minority of Russian linguists. Linguists worldwide reject Eurasiatic and many other macrofamily hypotheses such as Nostratic, with the exception of Dené–Yeniseian languages, which has been met with some degree of acceptance.[4]

  1. ^ Campbell, Lyle (2013). Historical linguistics : an introduction (Third ed.). Edinburgh. p. 346. ISBN 978-0-7486-7559-3. OCLC 828792941.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  2. ^ Georg, Stefan (2023). "Connections between Uralic and Other Language Families". In Daniel Abondolo; Riitta-Liisa Valijärvi (eds.). The Uralic Languages. London: Routledge. pp. 176–209. doi:10.4324/9781315625096-4. ISBN 9781315625096. Eurasiatic [...] did not win any acceptance among specialists.
  3. ^ Evolution of Human Languages (March 2014).
  4. ^ Campbell, Lyle (2013). Historical linguistics : an introduction (Third ed.). Edinburgh. p. 346. ISBN 978-0-7486-7559-3. OCLC 828792941.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)