Eurasiatic
| Eurasiatic | |
|---|---|
| (controversial) | |
| Geographic distribution: |
Before the 16th century, most of Eurasia; today worldwide |
| Linguistic classification: |
Nostratic (?)
|
| Subdivisions: |
|
| Glottolog: | None |
The worldwide distribution of the Eurasiatic macrofamily of languages according to Pagel et al.
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Eurasiatic is a proposed language macrofamily 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 Altaic (in the form 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.
In 1905, Alfredo Trombetti proposed the group in L'unità d'origine del linguaggio, a work arguing all human language derives from a single source.
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