Altaic languages

The Altaic languages (/ælˈteɪ.ɪk/ ^ⓘ al-TAY-ik) or Altaic sprachbund are a sprachbund comprising the Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic language families, with some linguists having included the Koreanic and Japonic 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 divide 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.

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. 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.

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.