Turanian is an obsolete language-family proposal subsuming most of the languages of Eurasia not included in

Indo-European The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the northern Indian subcontinent, most of Europe, and the Iranian plateau with additional native branches found in regions such as Sri Lanka, the Maldives, parts of Central Asia (e. ...

, Semitic and Chinese. During the 19th century, inspired by the establishment of the

family, scholars looked for similarly widespread families elsewhere. Building on the work of predecessors such as

Rasmus Rask Rasmus Kristian Rask (; born Rasmus Christian Nielsen Rasch; 22 November 1787 – 14 November 1832) was a Danish linguist and philologist. He wrote several grammars and worked on comparative phonology and morphology. Rask traveled extensively ...

and Matthias Castrén,

Max Müller Friedrich Max Müller (; 6 December 1823 – 28 October 1900) was a German-born British comparative philologist and oriental studies, Orientalist. He was one of the founders of the Western academic disciplines of Indology and religious s ...

proposed the Turanian grouping primarily on the basis of the incidence of

agglutinative In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes (word parts), each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglu ...

morphology, naming it after

Turan Turan (; ; , , ) is a historical region in Central Asia. The term is of Iranian origin and may refer to a particular prehistoric human settlement, a historic geographical region, or a culture. The original Turanians were an Iranian tribe of th ...

, an ancient Persian term for the lands of Central Asia. The languages he included are now generally assigned to nine separate language families.

Classification

In 1730, von Strahlenberg, relying on structural similarities of languages, proposed a group of "Tatar languages" spanning northern and central Eurasia and the languages of the Caucasus. In 1832, Rask added

Basque Basque may refer to: * Basques, an ethnic group of Spain and France * Basque language, their language Places * Basque Country (greater region), the homeland of the Basque people with parts in both Spain and France * Basque Country (autonomous co ...

and languages of Greenland and North America to von Strahlenberg's grouping, labelling the resulting group the "Scythian languages". Rask also added the

Dravidian languages The Dravidian languages are a language family, family of languages spoken by 250 million people, primarily in South India, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan, with pockets elsewhere in South Asia. The most commonly spoken Dravidian l ...

to this grouping on the basis of similarities in grammatical structure, postulating that the Scythian languages had once stretched from the Arctic Ocean to the Indian Ocean before being split by the intrusion of Indo-Aryan languages. Müller added even more languages to this group. He viewed the structure of the family as follows: * Turanian ** Northern Division ( Ural-Altaic) *** Tungusic *** Mongolic *** Turkic *** Samoyedic *** Finnic ** Southern Division *** Taic *** Malaic (

Malayo-Polynesian The Malayo-Polynesian languages are a subgroup of the Austronesian languages, with approximately 385.5 million speakers. The Malayo-Polynesian languages are spoken by the Austronesian peoples outside of Taiwan, in the island nations of Southeast ...

) *** Bhotîya ( Tibeto-Burman) **** Gangetic **** Lohitic *** Munda *** Tamulic ( Dravidian) He left Japonic, Koreanic, Koryak, Itelmen and various

languages of the Caucasus The Caucasian languages comprise a large and extremely varied array of languages spoken by more than ten million people in and around the Caucasus Mountains, which lie between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Linguistic comparison allows t ...

unclassified, but suggested that they might have a common origin with Turanian. He preferred to call Turanian a "language group", feeling that it was less tightly bound than "language families" like Indo-European and Semitic.

Reception

Linguists no longer consider typological features a sufficient criterion for the identification of language families. Such features are commonly shared by unrelated languages across the world, and also spread by interaction between unrelated languages. The proposal of a relationship between Ural-Altaic and Dravidian persisted in some late 19th century scholarship, but in the absence of further development, was considered an idle hypothesis already by the early 20th. The Ural-Altaic hypothesis was itself abandoned early in the 20th century. The

Altaic The Altaic () languages are a group of languages comprising the Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic language families, with some linguists including the Koreanic and Japonic families. These languages share agglutinative morphology, head-final ...

theory linking Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic is also rejected by most scholars. The combination of the Samoyedic and Finnic (Finno-Ugric) classes form the modern Uralic family, which is firmly established. Each of the five classes of Müller's southern division are now considered to belong to separate language families, Tai–Kadai, Austronesian, Sino-Tibetan,

Austroasiatic The Austroasiatic languages ( ) are a large language family spoken throughout Mainland Southeast Asia, South Asia and East Asia. These languages are natively spoken by the majority of the population in Vietnam and Cambodia, and by minority popu ...

and Dravidian respectively. The term "Turanian" remained for a time also a synonym for the Ural-Altaic hypothesis.

References

Works cited

* * * * * * * {{Eurasian languages Proposed language families