Martine Robbeets is a Belgian comparative linguist. She is known for the

Transeurasian languages Altaic (; also called Transeurasian) is a controversial proposed language family that would include the Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic language families and possibly also the Japonic and Koreanic languages. Speakers of these languages are c ...

hypothesis, which groups the

Japonic Japonic or Japanese–Ryukyuan, sometimes also Japanic, is a language family comprising Japanese, spoken in the main islands of Japan, and the Ryukyuan languages, spoken in the Ryukyu Islands. The family is universally accepted by linguists, and ...

Koreanic Koreanic is a small language family consisting of the Korean language, Korean and Jeju language, Jeju languages. The latter is often described as a dialect of Korean, but is distinct enough to be considered a separate language. Alexander Vovin s ...

, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic languages together into a single language family.

Education

Robbeets received a Ph.D. in Comparative Linguistics from

Leiden University Leiden University (abbreviated as ''LEI''; nl, Universiteit Leiden) is a Public university, public research university in Leiden, Netherlands. The university was founded as a Protestant university in 1575 by William the Silent, William, Prince o ...

, and also received a master's degree in Korean studies from

. She also holds a master's degree in Japanese studies from KU Leuven.

Career and research

In addition to being a lecturer at the University of Mainz, she is also a group leader at the

Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History The Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (german: Max-Planck-Institut für Menschheitsgeschichte) performs basic research into archaeological science. The institute is one of 80+ research institutes of the Max Planck Society and ...

Jena Jena () is a German city and the second largest city in Thuringia. Together with the nearby cities of Erfurt and Weimar, it forms the central metropolitan area of Thuringia with approximately 500,000 inhabitants, while the city itself has a popu ...

, Germany. In 2017, Robbeets proposed that Japanese (and possibly Korean) originated as a hybrid language. She proposed that the ancestral home of the Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages was somewhere in northwestern

Manchuria Manchuria is an exonym (derived from the endo demonym " Manchu") for a historical and geographic region in Northeast Asia encompassing the entirety of present-day Northeast China (Inner Manchuria) and parts of the Russian Far East (Outer Manc ...

. A group of those proto-Altaic ("Transeurasian") speakers would have migrated south into the modern

Liaoning Liaoning () is a coastal province in Northeast China that is the smallest, southernmost, and most populous province in the region. With its capital at Shenyang, it is located on the northern shore of the Yellow Sea, and is the northernmost ...

province, where they would have been mostly assimilated by an agricultural community with an Austronesian-like language. The fusion of the two languages would have resulted in proto-Japanese and proto-Korean.Martine Irma Robbeets (2017):
Austronesian influence and Transeurasian ancestry in Japanese: A case of farming/language dispersal
. ''Language Dynamics and Change'', volume 7, issue 2, pages 201–251, Martine Irma Robbeets (2015): ''Diachrony of verb morphology – Japanese and the Transeurasian languages''. Mouton de Gruyter. In 2018, Robbeets and Bouckaert used Bayesian phylolinguistic methods to argue for the coherence of the Altaic languages, which they refer to as the

.Robbeets, M.; Bouckaert, R.
Bayesian phylolinguistics reveals the internal structure of the Transeurasian family
''Journal of Language Evolution'' 3 (2), pp. 145 - 162 (2018) , Robbeets, Martine et al. 2021. Triangulation supports agricultural spread of the Transeurasian languages, Nature 599, 616–621.

Selected works

* Robbeets, M.; Savelyev, A.: ''Language dispersal beyond farming''. John Benjamins Publishing, Amsterdam (2017) * Robbeets, M.: ''Diachrony of verb morphology: Japanese and the Transeurasian languages''. de Gruyter Mouton, Berlin (2015) * Robbeets, M.; Bisang, W. (eds.): ''Paradigm change: in the Transeurasian languages and beyond''. Benjamins, Amsterdam (2014) * Robbeets, M.: ''Is Japanese related to Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic?'' Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden (2005)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Robbeets, Martine Living people Linguists of Altaic languages Paleolinguists Linguists from Belgium Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History 1972 births