Eskaleut

Position among the world's language families

Eskaleut does not have any proven genetic relationship to any of the world's other language families, this being generally accepted by linguists at the present time. There is general agreement that it is not closely related to the other language families of North America. The more credible proposals on the external relations of Eskaleut all concern one or more of the language families of northern Eurasia, such as Chukotko-Kamchatkan just across the Bering Strait. One of the first such proposals, the Eskimo–Uralic hypothesis, was suggested by the pioneering Danish linguist Rasmus Rask in 1818, upon noticing similarities between Greenlandic and Finnish. Eskimo-Uralic is the oldest proposal which connects the Eskaleut languages to other language families, and was suggested quickly after European contacts with Inuit. Perhaps the most fully developed proposal to date is Michael Fortescue's Uralo–Siberian hypothesis, published in 1998 which links Eskaleut languages to Yukaghir and the Uralic languages. Fortescue's observations have been evaluated by specialists with a limited degree of positivity but are viewed as scattered evidence and still remain highly speculative and unproven and the soundness of the reconstructed common ancestors are challenging to evaluate.