Nostratic languages

Nostratic
(controversial)
Geographic distribution:	Europe, Asia except for the southeast, North and Northeast Africa, the Arctic
Linguistic classification:	Proposed language family
Subdivisions:	Indo-European Uralic Turkic Mongolic Tungusic Koreanic Japonic Kartvelian Afroasiatic (sometimes included) Dravidian (sometimes included) Elamite (sometimes included) Sumerian (sometimes included) Nivkh (sometimes included) Yukaghir (not always considered) Chukotko-Kamchatkan (not always considered) Eskimo–Aleut (not always considered)
Glottolog:	None
The present day worldwide distribution of the Nostratic macrofamily of languages according to Sergei Starostin.

Nostratic is a macrofamily, or hypothetical large-scale language family, that includes many of the indigenous language families of Eurasia, although its exact composition and structure vary among proponents. It typically comprises the Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic and Kartvelian languages, as well as the Afroasiatic languages spoken in North Africa, the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Near East, and the Dravidian languages of the Indian Subcontinent (sometimes also Elamo-Dravidian, which connects India and the Iranian Plateau).

The hypothetical ancestral language of the Nostratic family is called Proto-Nostratic. Proto-Nostratic would have been spoken between 15,000 and 12,000 BCE, in the Epipaleolithic period, close to the end of the last glacial period.

The Nostratic hypothesis originates with Holger Pedersen in the early 20th century. The name "Nostratic" is due to Pedersen (1903), derived from the Latin "fellow countrymen". The hypothesis was significantly expanded in the 1960s by Soviet linguists, notably Vladislav Illich-Svitych and Aharon Dolgopolsky, termed the "Moscovite school" by Bomhard (2008, 2011, and 2014), and it has received renewed attention in English-speaking academia since the 1990s.