Dravido-Korean languages
| Indo-Pacific | |
|---|---|
| (disputed) | |
| Geographic distribution |
South Asia, Japan and Korea |
| Linguistic classification | One of the world's primary language families |
| Subdivisions | |
| Glottolog | None |
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Dravido-Koreo-Japonic, Dravido-Koreanic or Indo-Pacific is a disputedlanguage family proposal which links the living or proto-Dravidian language to Korean, Japanese, the Ainu language and several other small languages. The hypothesis was originally proposed by Morgan E. Clippinger in his "Korean and Dravidian: lexical evidence for an old theory" published in 1984 and Susumu Ōno in his "The origin of the Japanese language" in 1970. This proposal was seen as discredited during the time where the Korean language was hypothetically linked to the Altaic language family , which was later refuted. In 2011, Jung Nam Kim, president of the Korean Society of Tamil Studies, mentioned that the similarities between Korean and Dravidian are stronger than with any Altaic language, but he also said that this does not prove a genetic link between Dravidian and Korean and that more researches need to be done. He is sure that a genetic or areal connection exists because the similarities are too strong to be only coincidence. The Japanese linguists Susumu Ōno, Susumu Shiba and Akira Fujiwara are supporting a genetic relation between Japanese and Dravidian.
Similarities between Tamil and Korean were first noted by French missionaries in Korea.Susumu Ōno caused a stir in Japan with his theory that Tamil constituted a lexical strata of both Korean and Japanese, which was widely publicized in the 1980s but quickly abandoned. However, Clippinger's method was professional and his data reliable; hence, Ki-Moon Lee, Professor Emeritus at Seoul National University, opines that his conclusion could not be ignored and that it should be revisited. According to Homer B. Hulbert, many of the names of ancient cities of southern Korea and parts of Japan were the exact counterpart of Dravidian words and in some extent of Sanskrit. The Karak Kingdom of King Suro was named after the proto-Dravidian meaning 'fish'.
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