The Altaic languages (, ) or Altaic sprachbund are a sprachbund comprising the Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic language families. The grouping was previously proposed as a language family, a theory which found support in the 20th century but is now rejected by many linguists, who have concluded the similarities among Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages are better explained by areal convergence rather than a shared genetic lineage. There is still, however, a significant faction of academics advocating for the language label, as the debate is still running.
These languages share agglutinative morphology, head-final word order, and some vocabulary. The once-popular theory attributing these similarities to a common ancestry has been questioned by most comparative linguists in favor of language contact, although it continues to be supported by a smaller, yet stable scholarly minority. Like the Uralic language family, which is named after the Ural Mountains, the group is named after the Altai mountain range in the center of Asia.
The core grouping of Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages is sometimes referred to as "Micro-Altaic" or "Core-Altaic," while an expanded grouping that includes Koreanic and Japonic is labeled "Macro-Altaic". A group of scholars divided the Macro-Altaic family into two related branches: Altaic family (Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic) and Japano-Koreanic family (Japonic and Koreanic) which together are referred to as Transeurasian language family. Today, "Macro-Altaic", together with the idea that Japonic, Koreanic, or Ainu may be part of a genetically coherent family, has been firmly rejected, even by proponents of the Altaic theory. Consequently, the term "Altaic", (whether referred to as a language group or a sprachbund), now encompasses only the Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages.
The Altaic family was first proposed in the 18th century. It was widely accepted until the 1960s and is still listed in many encyclopedias and handbooks, and references to Altaic as a language family continue to percolate to modern sources through these older sources. Since the 1950s, most comparative linguists have rejected the proposal, after supposed cognates were found not to be valid, hypothesized sound shifts were not found, and Turkic and Mongolic languages were found to have been converging rather than diverging over the centuries.Lyle Campbell and Mauricio J. Mixco (2007): A Glossary of Historical Linguistics; University of Utah Press. Page 7: "While 'Altaic' is repeated in encyclopedias and handbooks most specialists in these languages no longer believe that the three traditional supposed Altaic groups, Turkic, Mongolian and Tungusic, are related."Johanna Nichols (1992) Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time. Chicago University Press. Page 4: "When cognates proved not to be valid, Altaic was abandoned and the received view now is that Turkic, Mongolian and Tungusic are unrelated."Asya Pereltsvaig (2012) Languages of the World, An Introduction. Cambridge University Press. Pages 211–216: "[...T]his selection of features does not provide good evidence for common descent" [...] "we can observe convergence rather than divergence between Turkic and Mongolic languages—a pattern than is easily explainable by borrowing and diffusion rather than common descent" The relationship between the Altaic languages is now generally accepted to be the result of a sprachbund rather than common ancestry, with the languages showing influence from prolonged contact.R. M. W. Dixon (1997): The Rise and Fall of Languages. Cambridge University Press. Page 32: "Careful examination indicates that the established families, Turkic, Mongolian and Tungusic, form a linguistic area (called Altaic)...Sufficient criteria have not been given that would justify talking of a genetic relationship here."
Altaic has maintained a limited degree of scholarly support, in contrast to some other early macrofamily proposals. Continued research on Altaic is still being undertaken by a core group of academic linguists, but their research has not found wider support. In particular it has support from the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences and remains influential as a substratum of Turanism, where a hypothetical common linguistic ancestor has been used in part as a basis for a multiethnic nationalist movement.
Earliest attestations The earliest attested expressions in Proto-Turkic are recorded in various Chinese sources. Anna Dybo identifies in Shizi (330 BC) and the Book of Han (AD 111) several dozen Proto-Turkic exotisms in Chinese Han transcriptions.Anna Dybo (2012) Early contacts of Turks and problems of Proto-Turkic reconstruction. Lanhai Wei and Hui Li reconstruct the name of the Xiōngnú ruling house as PT *Alayundluğ 'piebald horse clan.'Lanhai Wei and Hui Li (2018) About the names of Chanyu family and branch tribes of Xiongnu.
The earliest known texts in a Turkic language are the Orkhon inscriptions, 720–735 AD. They were deciphered in 1893 by the Danish linguist Vilhelm Thomsen in a scholarly race with his rival, the German–Russian linguist Wilhelm Radloff. However, Radloff was the first to publish the inscriptions.
The first Tungusic language to be attested is Jurchen, the language of the ancestors of the Manchus. A writing system for it was devised in 1119 AD and an inscription using this system is known from 1185 (see List of Jurchen inscriptions).
The earliest Mongolic language of which we have written evidence is known as Middle Mongol. It is first attested by an inscription dated to 1224 or 1225 AD, the Stele of Yisüngge, and by the Secret History of the Mongols, written in 1228 (see Mongolic languages). The earliest Para-Mongolic text is the Memorial for Yelü Yanning, written in the Khitan large script and dated to 986 AD. However, the Inscription of Hüis Tolgoi, discovered in 1975 and analysed as being in an early form of Mongolic, has been dated to 604–620 AD. The Bugut inscription dates back to 584 AD.
Japanese is first attested in the form of names contained in a few short inscriptions in Classical Chinese from the 5th century AD, such as found on the Inariyama Sword. The first substantial text in Japanese, however, is the Kojiki, which dates from 712 AD. It is followed by the Nihon shoki, completed in 720, and then by the Man'yōshū, which dates from c. 771–785, but includes material that is from about 400 years earlier.
The most important text for the study of early Korean is the Hyangga, a collection of 25 poems, of which some go back to the Three Kingdoms period (57 BC–668 AD), but are preserved in an orthography that only goes back to the 9th century AD. Korean is copiously attested from the mid-15th century on in the phonetically precise Hangul system of writing.
History of the Altaic family concept
Origins The earliest known reference to a unified language group of Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages is from the 1692 work of Nicolaes Witsen, which may be based on a 1661 work of Abu al-Ghazi Bahadur, Genealogy of the Turkmens.
A proposed grouping of the Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages was published in 1730 by Philip Johan von Strahlenberg, a Swedish officer who traveled in the eastern Russian Empire while a prisoner of war after the Great Northern War.Nicholas Poppe (1965): Introduction to Altaic Linguistics. Volume 14 of Ural-altaische Bibliothek. Otto Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden. However, he may not have intended to imply a closer relationship among those languages.Alexis Manaster Ramer and Paul Sidwell (1997): "The truth about Strahlenberg's classification of the languages of Northeastern Eurasia." Journal de la Société finno-ougrienne, volume 87, pages 139–160. Later proposals to include the Korean and Japanese languages into a "Macro-Altaic" family have always been controversial. The original proposal was sometimes called "Micro-Altaic" by retronymy. According to Blench & Dendo (2008), most proponents of Altaic continue to support the inclusion of Korean, but fewer do for Japanese.Roger Blench and Mallam Dendo (2008): "Stratification in the peopling of China: how far does the linguistic evidence match genetics and archaeology?" In Alicia Sanchez-Mazas et al., eds. Human migrations in continental East Asia and Taiwan: genetic, linguistic and archaeological evidence, chapter 4. Taylor & Francis. Some proposals also included Ainuic but this is not widely accepted even among Altaicists themselves. A common ancestral Proto-Altaic language for the "Macro" family has been tentatively reconstructed by Sergei Starostin and others.
Micro-Altaic includes about 66 living languages, to which Macro-Altaic would add Korean, Jeju, Japanese, and the Ryukyuan languages, for a total of about 74 (depending on what is considered a language and what is considered a dialect). These numbers do not include earlier states of languages, such as Middle Mongol, Old Korean, or Old Japanese.
Uralo-Altaic hypothesis
In 1844, the Finnish philologist Matthias Castrén proposed a broader grouping which later came to be called the Ural–Altaic family, which included Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu-Tungus (=Tungusic) as an "Altaic" branch, and also the Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic languages as the "Uralic" branch (though Castrén himself used the terms "Tataric" and "Chudic"). The name "Altaic" referred to the Altai Mountains in East-Central Asia, which are approximately the center of the geographic range of the three main families. The name "Uralic" referred to the Ural Mountains.
While the Ural-Altaic family hypothesis can still be found in some encyclopedias, atlases, and similar general references, since the 1960s it has been heavily criticized. Even linguists who accept the basic Altaic family, such as Sergei Starostin, completely discard the inclusion of the "Uralic" branch.
The term continues to be used for the central Eurasian typological, grammatical and lexical convergence zone.BROWN, Keith and OGILVIE, Sarah eds.:Concise Encyclopedia of Languages of the World. 2009. p. 722. Indeed, "Ural-Altaic" may be preferable to "Altaic" in this sense. For example, Juha Janhunen states that "speaking of 'Altaic' instead of 'Ural-Altaic' is a misconception, for there are no areal or typological features that are specific to 'Altaic' without Uralic."
Korean and Japanese languages In 1857, the Austrian scholar Anton Boller suggested adding Japanese to the Ural–Altaic family.Roy Andrew Miller (1986): Nihongo: In Defence of Japanese. .
In the 1920s, G.J. Ramstedt and E.D. Polivanov advocated the inclusion of Korean. Decades later, in his 1952 book, Ramstedt rejected the Ural–Altaic hypothesis but again included Korean in Altaic, an inclusion followed by most leading Altaicists (supporters of the theory) to date.Gustaf John Ramstedt (1952): Einführung in die altaische Sprachwissenschaft ("Introduction to Altaic Linguistics"). Volume I, Lautlehre ("Phonology"). His book contained the first comprehensive attempt to identify regular correspondences among the sound systems within the Altaic language families.