Altaic languages

The Altaic languages ( , al-TAY-ik) 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...