Altaic

Altaic
(largely discredited)
Geographic distribution:	North, Central, and West Asia, and Eastern Europe
Linguistic classification:	Traditionally considered a major language family; now usually considered as a sprachbund
Subdivisions:	Turkic Mongolic Tungusic Koreanic (occasionally included) Japonic (sometimes included) Ainu (rarely included)
ISO 639-2 / 5:
Glottolog:	None
Turkic languages   Mongolic languages   Tungusic languages   Koreanic languages   Japonic languages   Ainu language

Altaic (/ælˈteɪ.ᵻk/) was a proposed language family of central Eurasia and Siberia, now widely seen as discredited.

Various versions included the Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic and sometimes the Korean and Japonic languages. These languages are spoken in a wide arc stretching from northeast Asia through Central Asia to Anatolia and eastern Europe. The group is named after the Altai mountain range in Central Asia.

Another view accepts Altaic as a valid family but includes in it only Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic. This view was widespread prior to the 1960s but has almost no supporters among specialists today. The expanded grouping, including Korean and sometimes Japanese, came to be known as "Macro-Altaic", leading to the designation of the smaller grouping as "Micro-Altaic" by retronymy. Most proponents of Altaic continue to support the inclusion of Korean.

Micro-Altaic includes about 66 living languages, to which Macro-Altaic would add Korean, Japanese, and the Ryukyuan languages for a total of about 74. (These are estimates, depending on what is considered a language and what is considered a dialect. They do not include earlier states of languages, such as Middle Mongol or Old Japanese.)