Borean languages
Encyclopedia
Borean is a hypothetical linguistic macrofamily
that traces the possible genetic relationships of the various languages of Eurasia
and adjacent regions with languages spoken in the Upper Paleolithic
in the millennia following the Last Glacial Maximum
. The name "Borean", based on Greek βορέας, means "northern". This reflects the fact that the group includes most language families native to the northern hemisphere
, but is not thought to include language families native to the southern hemisphere. Two distinct models of the Borean macrofamily exist: that of Harold C. Fleming
and that of Sergei Starostin
. Neither model has widespread scholarly acceptance.
(1987), who proposed such a "mega-super-phylum" for the languages of Eurasia, termed Borean or Boreal in Fleming (1991) and later publications. In Fleming's model, Borean includes ten different groups: Afrasian (his term for Afroasiatic), Kartvelian
, Dravidian
, a group comprising Sumerian
, Elamitic
, and some other extinct languages of the ancient Near East
, Eurasiatic
(a proposal of Joseph Greenberg
that includes Indo-European
, Uralic
, Altaic
, and several other language families), Macro-Caucasian (a proposal of John Bengtson
that includes Basque
and Burushaski), Yeniseian
, Sino-Tibetan
, Na-Dene
, and Amerind
.
Fleming writes that his work on Borean is inspired by Greenberg's exploration of Eurasiatic, and is "specifically oriented towards the concept of 'valid taxon'". He rejects Nostratic
, a proposed macrofamily somewhat broader than Eurasiatic, and withholds judgment on Dené–Caucasian, a proposed macrofamily that would encompass Sino-Tibetan, Yeniseian, Basque, and several other language families and isolates. Fleming describes Borean as a "phyletic chain" rather than a super-phylum. He notes that his model of Borean is similar to Morris Swadesh
's Vasco-Dene proposal, although he also sees similarities between Vasco-Dene and Dené–Caucasian. He sees Borean as closely associated with the appearance of the Upper Paleolithic in the Levant, Europe, and western Eurasia from 50 thousand to 45 thousand years ago, and observes that it is primarily associated with human populations of Caucasoid
and Northern Mongoloid
physical appearance, the exceptions being southern India
, southern China
, southwestern Ethiopia
, northern Nigeria
, and the Chad Republic
.
Gell-Mann et al note that Fleming's Borean macrofamily is "a somewhat different linguistic entity" from the one they propose.
(2002), Borean is divided into two groups, Nostratic and Dene–Daic, the latter consisting of the Dené–Caucasian and Austric macrofamilies. Starostin tentatively dates the Borean proto-language to the Upper Paleolithic, approximately 16 thousand years ago. Starostin's model of Borean would thus include most languages of Eurasia
, as well as the Afroasiatic languages of North and East Africa, and the Eskimo–Aleut and the Na-Dene languages of the New World
.
Murray Gell-Mann
, Ilia Peiros, and Georgiy Starostin
maintain that the comparative method has provided strong evidence for some linguistic superfamilies (Sino-Caucasian and Eurasiatic), but not so far for others (Afroasiatic and Austric). Their view is that since some of these families have not yet been reconstructed and others still require improvement, it is impossible to apply the strict comparative method to even older and larger groups. However, they consider this only a technical rather than a theoretical problem, and reject the idea that linguistic relationships further back in time than 10 thousand years before the present cannot be reconstructed since the "main objects of research in this case are not modern languages, but reconstructed proto-languages which turn out to be more similar to one another than their modern day descendants." They believe that good reconstructions of superfamilies such as Eurasiatic will eventually help in investigating still deeper linguistic relationships. While such 'ultra-deep' relationships can currently be discussed only on a very speculative level, they maintain that the numerous morphemic similarities between language families of Eurasia, many of which Sergei Starostin compiled into a special database that he later supplemented by his own findings, are unlikely to be due to chance, making it possible to formulate a Borean super-superfamily hypothesis open to 'bona fide' discussion.
They have also suggested possible links between 'Borean' and other families. In their view comparisons with 'Borean' data suggest that Khoisan
cannot be included within it but that more distant connections on an even deeper level might be possible, that how the African superfamilies Niger–Congo
, East Sudanic, Central Sudanic
and Kordofanian
are related to Borean remains to be investigated, that the situation with the native languages of the Americas remains unresolved, and that while there are some lexical similarities between Borean and the Trans–New Guinea, these remain too scarce to establish a firm connection. They comment that while preliminary data indicates possible connections between Borean and some superfamilies from Africa, the Americas, and the Indo-Pacific region, "Further research into distant relationships of languages is needed to find out whether these additional superfamilies are related to 'Borean' on a higher level or are hitherto unidentified branches of 'Borean'."
Sergei Starostin died prematurely in 2005 and his hypothesis remains in a preliminary form, with much of the material he collected available online.
Research into the deep prehistory of language history is not accepted as yielding meaningful results in mainstream historical linguistics
. Consequently, both the Borean hypothesis and most of its proposed immediate constituents in Starostin's model, including Nostratic and Dené–Caucasian, do not have widespread acceptance in scholarship. The phylogenetic composition of Borean according to Starostin is as follows:
Macrofamily
In historical linguistics, a macro-family, also called a superfamily or phylum, is defined as a proposed genetic relationship grouping together language families in a larger scale clasification.However, Campbell regards this term as superfluous, preferring language family for those clasifications...
that traces the possible genetic relationships of the various languages of Eurasia
Eurasia
Eurasia is a continent or supercontinent comprising the traditional continents of Europe and Asia ; covering about 52,990,000 km2 or about 10.6% of the Earth's surface located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres...
and adjacent regions with languages spoken in the Upper Paleolithic
Upper Paleolithic
The Upper Paleolithic is the third and last subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age as it is understood in Europe, Africa and Asia. Very broadly it dates to between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago, roughly coinciding with the appearance of behavioral modernity and before the advent of...
in the millennia following the Last Glacial Maximum
Last Glacial Maximum
The Last Glacial Maximum refers to a period in the Earth's climate history when ice sheets were at their maximum extension, between 26,500 and 19,000–20,000 years ago, marking the peak of the last glacial period. During this time, vast ice sheets covered much of North America, northern Europe and...
. The name "Borean", based on Greek βορέας, means "northern". This reflects the fact that the group includes most language families native to the northern hemisphere
Northern Hemisphere
The Northern Hemisphere is the half of a planet that is north of its equator—the word hemisphere literally means “half sphere”. It is also that half of the celestial sphere north of the celestial equator...
, but is not thought to include language families native to the southern hemisphere. Two distinct models of the Borean macrofamily exist: that of Harold C. Fleming
Harold C. Fleming
Harold Crane Fleming is an American anthropologist and historical linguist, specializing in the cultures and languages of the Horn of Africa. As an adherent of the Four Field School of American anthropology, he stresses the integration of physical anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, and...
and that of Sergei Starostin
Sergei Starostin
Dr. Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin was a Russian historical linguist and scholar, best known for his work with hypothetical proto-languages, including his work on the reconstruction of the Proto-Borean language, the controversial theory of Altaic languages and the formulation of the Dené–Caucasian...
. Neither model has widespread scholarly acceptance.
Fleming's model
The concept is due to Harold C. FlemingHarold C. Fleming
Harold Crane Fleming is an American anthropologist and historical linguist, specializing in the cultures and languages of the Horn of Africa. As an adherent of the Four Field School of American anthropology, he stresses the integration of physical anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, and...
(1987), who proposed such a "mega-super-phylum" for the languages of Eurasia, termed Borean or Boreal in Fleming (1991) and later publications. In Fleming's model, Borean includes ten different groups: Afrasian (his term for Afroasiatic), Kartvelian
South Caucasian languages
The Kartvelian languages are spoken primarily in Georgia, with a large group of ethnic Georgian speakers in Russia, the United States, the European Union, and northeastern parts of Turkey. There are approximately 5.2 million speakers of this language family worldwide.It is not known to be related...
, Dravidian
Dravidian languages
The Dravidian language family includes approximately 85 genetically related languages, spoken by about 217 million people. They are mainly spoken in southern India and parts of eastern and central India as well as in northeastern Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Iran, and...
, a group comprising Sumerian
Sumerian language
Sumerian is the language of ancient Sumer, which was spoken in southern Mesopotamia since at least the 4th millennium BC. During the 3rd millennium BC, there developed a very intimate cultural symbiosis between the Sumerians and the Akkadians, which included widespread bilingualism...
, Elamitic
Elamite language
Elamite is an extinct language spoken by the ancient Elamites. Elamite was the primary language in present day Iran from 2800–550 BCE. The last written records in Elamite appear about the time of the conquest of the Persian Empire by Alexander the Great....
, and some other extinct languages of the ancient Near East
Near East
The Near East is a geographical term that covers different countries for geographers, archeologists, and historians, on the one hand, and for political scientists, economists, and journalists, on the other...
, Eurasiatic
Eurasiatic languages
Eurasiatic is a language macrofamily proposed by Joseph Greenberg that includes many language families historically spoken in northern Eurasia. The eight branches of Eurasiatic are Etruscan, Indo-European, Uralic–Yukaghir, Altaic, Korean-Japanese-Ainu, Gilyak, Chukotian, and Eskimo–Aleut, spoken in...
(a proposal of Joseph Greenberg
Joseph Greenberg
Joseph Harold Greenberg was a prominent and controversial American linguist, principally known for his work in two areas, linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages.- Early life and career :...
that includes Indo-European
Indo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...
, Uralic
Uralic languages
The Uralic languages constitute a language family of some three dozen languages spoken by approximately 25 million people. The healthiest Uralic languages in terms of the number of native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mari and Udmurt...
, Altaic
Altaic languages
Altaic is a proposed language family that includes the Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, and Japonic language families and the Korean language isolate. These languages are spoken in a wide arc stretching from northeast Asia through Central Asia to Anatolia and eastern Europe...
, and several other language families), Macro-Caucasian (a proposal of John Bengtson
John Bengtson
John D. Bengtson is a historical and anthropological linguist. He is a past president and currently a vice-president of the Association for the Study of Language in Prehistory, and has served as editor of the journal Mother Tongue...
that includes Basque
Basque language
Basque is the ancestral language of the Basque people, who inhabit the Basque Country, a region spanning an area in northeastern Spain and southwestern France. It is spoken by 25.7% of Basques in all territories...
and Burushaski), Yeniseian
Yeniseian languages
The Yeniseian language family is spoken in central Siberia.-Family division:0. Proto-Yeniseian...
, Sino-Tibetan
Sino-Tibetan languages
The Sino-Tibetan languages are a language family comprising, at least, the Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman languages, including some 250 languages of East Asia, Southeast Asia and parts of South Asia. They are second only to the Indo-European languages in terms of the number of native speakers...
, Na-Dene
Na-Dené languages
Na-Dene is a Native American language family which includes at least the Athabaskan languages, Eyak, and Tlingit languages. An inclusion of Haida is controversial....
, and Amerind
Amerind languages
Amerind is a higher-level language family proposed by Joseph Greenberg in 1960. Greenberg proposed that all of the indigenous languages of the Americas belong to one of three language families, the previously established Eskimo–Aleut and Na–Dene, and with everything else—almost universally believed...
.
Fleming writes that his work on Borean is inspired by Greenberg's exploration of Eurasiatic, and is "specifically oriented towards the concept of 'valid taxon'". He rejects Nostratic
Nostratic languages
Nostratic is a proposed language family that includes many of the indigenous language families of Eurasia, including the Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic as well as Kartvelian languages...
, a proposed macrofamily somewhat broader than Eurasiatic, and withholds judgment on Dené–Caucasian, a proposed macrofamily that would encompass Sino-Tibetan, Yeniseian, Basque, and several other language families and isolates. Fleming describes Borean as a "phyletic chain" rather than a super-phylum. He notes that his model of Borean is similar to Morris Swadesh
Morris Swadesh
Morris Swadesh was an influential and controversial American linguist. In his work, he applied basic concepts in historical linguistics to the Indigenous languages of the Americas...
's Vasco-Dene proposal, although he also sees similarities between Vasco-Dene and Dené–Caucasian. He sees Borean as closely associated with the appearance of the Upper Paleolithic in the Levant, Europe, and western Eurasia from 50 thousand to 45 thousand years ago, and observes that it is primarily associated with human populations of Caucasoid
Caucasian race
The term Caucasian race has been used to denote the general physical type of some or all of the populations of Europe, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Western Asia , Central Asia and South Asia...
and Northern Mongoloid
Mongoloid race
Mongoloid is a term sometimes used by forensic anthropologists and physical anthropologists to refer to populations that share certain phenotypic traits such as epicanthic fold and shovel-shaped incisors and other physical traits common in East Asia, the Americas and the Arctic...
physical appearance, the exceptions being southern India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
, southern China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
, southwestern Ethiopia
Ethiopia
Ethiopia , officially known as the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. It is the second-most populous nation in Africa, with over 82 million inhabitants, and the tenth-largest by area, occupying 1,100,000 km2...
, northern Nigeria
Nigeria
Nigeria , officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a federal constitutional republic comprising 36 states and its Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. The country is located in West Africa and shares land borders with the Republic of Benin in the west, Chad and Cameroon in the east, and Niger in...
, and the Chad Republic
Chad
Chad , officially known as the Republic of Chad, is a landlocked country in Central Africa. It is bordered by Libya to the north, Sudan to the east, the Central African Republic to the south, Cameroon and Nigeria to the southwest, and Niger to the west...
.
Gell-Mann et al note that Fleming's Borean macrofamily is "a somewhat different linguistic entity" from the one they propose.
Starostin's model
As envisaged by Sergei StarostinSergei Starostin
Dr. Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin was a Russian historical linguist and scholar, best known for his work with hypothetical proto-languages, including his work on the reconstruction of the Proto-Borean language, the controversial theory of Altaic languages and the formulation of the Dené–Caucasian...
(2002), Borean is divided into two groups, Nostratic and Dene–Daic, the latter consisting of the Dené–Caucasian and Austric macrofamilies. Starostin tentatively dates the Borean proto-language to the Upper Paleolithic, approximately 16 thousand years ago. Starostin's model of Borean would thus include most languages of Eurasia
Eurasia
Eurasia is a continent or supercontinent comprising the traditional continents of Europe and Asia ; covering about 52,990,000 km2 or about 10.6% of the Earth's surface located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres...
, as well as the Afroasiatic languages of North and East Africa, and the Eskimo–Aleut and the Na-Dene languages of the New World
New World
The New World is one of the names used for the Western Hemisphere, specifically America and sometimes Oceania . The term originated in the late 15th century, when America had been recently discovered by European explorers, expanding the geographical horizon of the people of the European middle...
.
Murray Gell-Mann
Murray Gell-Mann
Murray Gell-Mann is an American physicist and linguist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles...
, Ilia Peiros, and Georgiy Starostin
Georgiy Starostin
Georgiy Sergeevich Starostin is a Russian linguistics researcher at the Center of Comparative Studies at the Russian State University for the Humanities, and a participant at the Santa Fe Institute's Evolution of Human Languages project...
maintain that the comparative method has provided strong evidence for some linguistic superfamilies (Sino-Caucasian and Eurasiatic), but not so far for others (Afroasiatic and Austric). Their view is that since some of these families have not yet been reconstructed and others still require improvement, it is impossible to apply the strict comparative method to even older and larger groups. However, they consider this only a technical rather than a theoretical problem, and reject the idea that linguistic relationships further back in time than 10 thousand years before the present cannot be reconstructed since the "main objects of research in this case are not modern languages, but reconstructed proto-languages which turn out to be more similar to one another than their modern day descendants." They believe that good reconstructions of superfamilies such as Eurasiatic will eventually help in investigating still deeper linguistic relationships. While such 'ultra-deep' relationships can currently be discussed only on a very speculative level, they maintain that the numerous morphemic similarities between language families of Eurasia, many of which Sergei Starostin compiled into a special database that he later supplemented by his own findings, are unlikely to be due to chance, making it possible to formulate a Borean super-superfamily hypothesis open to 'bona fide' discussion.
They have also suggested possible links between 'Borean' and other families. In their view comparisons with 'Borean' data suggest that Khoisan
Khoisan languages
The Khoisan languages are the click languages of Africa which do not belong to other language families. They include languages indigenous to southern and eastern Africa, though some, such as the Khoi languages, appear to have moved to their current locations not long before the Bantu expansion...
cannot be included within it but that more distant connections on an even deeper level might be possible, that how the African superfamilies Niger–Congo
Niger–Congo languages
The Niger–Congo languages constitute one of the world's major language families, and Africa's largest in terms of geographical area, number of speakers, and number of distinct languages. They may constitute the world's largest language family in terms of distinct languages, although this question...
, East Sudanic, Central Sudanic
Central Sudanic languages
Starostin notes that the poorly attested language Mimi of Decorse is suggestive of Central Sudanic, though he provisionally treats it as an isolate.-References:...
and Kordofanian
Kordofanian languages
The Kordofanian languages are a geographic grouping of three to five language families spoken in the Nuba Mountains of Kordofan Province, Sudan. In 1963 Joseph Greenberg added them to the Niger–Congo family, creating his Niger–Kordofanian proposal...
are related to Borean remains to be investigated, that the situation with the native languages of the Americas remains unresolved, and that while there are some lexical similarities between Borean and the Trans–New Guinea, these remain too scarce to establish a firm connection. They comment that while preliminary data indicates possible connections between Borean and some superfamilies from Africa, the Americas, and the Indo-Pacific region, "Further research into distant relationships of languages is needed to find out whether these additional superfamilies are related to 'Borean' on a higher level or are hitherto unidentified branches of 'Borean'."
Sergei Starostin died prematurely in 2005 and his hypothesis remains in a preliminary form, with much of the material he collected available online.
Research into the deep prehistory of language history is not accepted as yielding meaningful results in mainstream historical linguistics
Historical linguistics
Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...
. Consequently, both the Borean hypothesis and most of its proposed immediate constituents in Starostin's model, including Nostratic and Dené–Caucasian, do not have widespread acceptance in scholarship. The phylogenetic composition of Borean according to Starostin is as follows:
- "Borean"
- NostraticNostratic languagesNostratic is a proposed language family that includes many of the indigenous language families of Eurasia, including the Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic as well as Kartvelian languages...
(speculative, Holger PedersenHolger PedersenHolger Pedersen may refer to:* Holger Pedersen - Danish linguist * Holger Pedersen - Danish astronomer , at the European Southern Observatory* Holger Petersen - Canadian radio personality....
1903)- Afroasiatic (widely recognized family)
- EurasiaticEurasiatic languagesEurasiatic is a language macrofamily proposed by Joseph Greenberg that includes many language families historically spoken in northern Eurasia. The eight branches of Eurasiatic are Etruscan, Indo-European, Uralic–Yukaghir, Altaic, Korean-Japanese-Ainu, Gilyak, Chukotian, and Eskimo–Aleut, spoken in...
(speculative, Joseph GreenbergJoseph GreenbergJoseph Harold Greenberg was a prominent and controversial American linguist, principally known for his work in two areas, linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages.- Early life and career :...
2000), c.f. Indo-UralicIndo-Uralic languagesIndo-Uralic is a proposed language family consisting of Indo-European and Uralic.A genetic relationship between Indo-European and Uralic was first proposed by the Danish linguist Vilhelm Thomsen in 1869 but was received with little enthusiasm...
- Indo-EuropeanIndo-European languagesThe Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...
(widely recognized family) - UralicUralic languagesThe Uralic languages constitute a language family of some three dozen languages spoken by approximately 25 million people. The healthiest Uralic languages in terms of the number of native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mari and Udmurt...
(widely recognized family) - Macro-AltaicAltaic languagesAltaic is a proposed language family that includes the Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, and Japonic language families and the Korean language isolate. These languages are spoken in a wide arc stretching from northeast Asia through Central Asia to Anatolia and eastern Europe...
(controversial; Roy Andrew MillerRoy Andrew MillerRoy Andrew Miller is a linguist notable for his advocacy of Korean and Japanese as members of the Altaic group of languages....
1971, Gustaf John RamstedtGustaf John RamstedtGustaf John Ramstedt was a Swedish-speaking Finnish linguist and diplomat.-Biography:Ramstedt was born in Ekenäs in Southern Finland....
1952, Matthias CastrénMatthias CastrénMatthias Alexander Castrén was a Finnish ethnologist and philologist.Castrén was born at Tervola, in Northern Finland, on the 20th of November...
1844)- TurkicTurkic languagesThe Turkic languages constitute a language family of at least thirty five languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China, and are considered to be part of the proposed Altaic language family.Turkic languages are spoken...
(widely recognized family) - MongolicMongolic languagesThe Mongolic languages are a group of languages spoken in East-Central Asia, mostly in Mongolia and surrounding areas plus in Kalmykia. The best-known member of this language family, Mongolian, is the primary language of most of the residents of Mongolia and the Mongolian residents of Inner...
(widely recognized family) - TungusicTungusic languagesThe Tungusic languages form a language family spoken in Eastern Siberia and Manchuria by Tungusic peoples. Many Tungusic languages are endangered, and the long-term future of the family is uncertain...
(widely recognized family) - KoreanKorean languageKorean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...
(language isolate) - JaponicJaponic languagesJaponic languages is a term which identifies and characterises the Japanese which is spoken on the main islands of Japan and the Ryukyuan languages spoken in the Ryukyu Islands. This widely accepted linguistics term was coined by Leon Serafim....
(widely recognized family)
- Turkic
- KartvelianSouth Caucasian languagesThe Kartvelian languages are spoken primarily in Georgia, with a large group of ethnic Georgian speakers in Russia, the United States, the European Union, and northeastern parts of Turkey. There are approximately 5.2 million speakers of this language family worldwide.It is not known to be related...
(widely recognized family) - DravidianDravidian languagesThe Dravidian language family includes approximately 85 genetically related languages, spoken by about 217 million people. They are mainly spoken in southern India and parts of eastern and central India as well as in northeastern Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Iran, and...
(widely recognized family) - PaleosiberianPaleosiberian languagesPaleosiberian languages or Paleoasian languages is a term of convenience used in linguistics to classify a disparate group of languages spoken in some parts of north-eastern Siberia and some parts of Russian Far East...
(phylogenetic unity widely rejected)- NivkhNivkh languageNivkh or Gilyak is a language spoken in Outer Manchuria, in the basin of the Amgun , along the lower reaches of the Amur itself, and on the northern half of Sakhalin. 'Gilyak' is the Manchu appellation...
- Eskimo–Aleut
- YukaghirYukaghir languagesThe Yukaghir languages are a small family of two closely related languages – Tundra and Kolyma Yukaghir – spoken by the Yukaghir in the Russian Far East living in the basin of the Kolyma River. According to the 2002 Russian census, both Yukaghir languages taken together have 604 speakers...
(sometimes grouped with Uralic) - Chukotko-KamchatkanChukotko-Kamchatkan languagesThe Chukotko-Kamchatkan or Chukchi–Kamchatkan languages are a language family of extreme northeastern Siberia. Its speakers are indigenous hunter-gatherers and reindeer-herders....
- Nivkh
- Indo-European
- Dene–Daic (speculative, Starostin 2005)
- Dené–Caucasian (speculative, Nikolayev 1991; expanded by Bengtson 1997), c.f. Dené–Yeniseian (Edward VajdaEdward VajdaEdward Vajda is a historical linguist at Western Washington University. He has become known for his work on the proposed Dené–Yeniseian language family, seeking to establish that the Ket language of Siberia has a common linguistic ancestor with the Na-Dené languages of North America...
2008)- Na-DenéNa-Dené languagesNa-Dene is a Native American language family which includes at least the Athabaskan languages, Eyak, and Tlingit languages. An inclusion of Haida is controversial....
(widely recognized family) - BasqueBasque languageBasque is the ancestral language of the Basque people, who inhabit the Basque Country, a region spanning an area in northeastern Spain and southwestern France. It is spoken by 25.7% of Basques in all territories...
(language isolate) - Sino-Caucasian (speculative, Starostin 2006)
- Sino-TibetanSino-Tibetan languagesThe Sino-Tibetan languages are a language family comprising, at least, the Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman languages, including some 250 languages of East Asia, Southeast Asia and parts of South Asia. They are second only to the Indo-European languages in terms of the number of native speakers...
(widely recognized family) - North CaucasianNorth Caucasian languagesNorth Caucasian languages is a blanket term for two language phyla spoken chiefly in the north Caucasus and Turkey: the Northwest Caucasian family and the Northeast Caucasian family North Caucasian languages (sometimes called simply Caucasic as opposed to Kartvelian, and to avoid confusion with...
(speculative unification of East Caucasian and West Caucasian, Nikolayev & Starostin 1994) - YeniseianYeniseian languagesThe Yeniseian language family is spoken in central Siberia.-Family division:0. Proto-Yeniseian...
(widely recognized family) - Burushaski (language isolate)
- Sino-Tibetan
- Na-Dené
- AustricAustric languagesThe Austric language superfamily is a large hypothetical grouping of languages primarily spoken in Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and the eastern Indian subcontinent. It includes the Austronesian language family of Taiwan, the Malay Archipelago, Pacific Islands, and Madagascar, as well as the...
(speculative, Wilhelm SchmidtWilhelm SchmidtWilhelm Schmidt was an Austrian linguist, anthropologist, and ethnologist.Wilhelm Schmidt was born in Hörde, Germany in 1868. He entered the Society of the Divine Word in 1890 and was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in 1892. He studied linguistics at the universities of Berlin and...
1906)- Austro-AsiaticAustro-Asiatic languagesThe Austro-Asiatic languages, in recent classifications synonymous with Mon–Khmer, are a large language family of Southeast Asia, also scattered throughout India and Bangladesh. The name Austro-Asiatic comes from the Latin words for "south" and "Asia", hence "South Asia"...
(widely recognized family) - Miao–Yao (widely recognized family)
- Austro-Tai (speculative, Paul Benedict 1942)
- AustronesianAustronesian languagesThe Austronesian languages are a language family widely dispersed throughout the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia that are spoken by about 386 million people. It is on par with Indo-European, Niger-Congo, Afroasiatic and Uralic as one of the...
(commonly recognized family) - Tai–Kadai (widely recognized family)
- Austronesian
- Austro-Asiatic
- Dené–Caucasian (speculative, Nikolayev 1991; expanded by Bengtson 1997), c.f. Dené–Yeniseian (Edward Vajda
- Nostratic