Long-range comparative linguistics

proposed common ancestor to all known languages

A macrofamily (also called a superfamily or superphylum) is a term often used in historical linguistics to refer to a hypothetical higher order grouping of languages, composed of multiple language families and/or isolates. Some scholars, such as Campbell, view this designation as superfluous or redundant, preferring "language family" for those classifications for which there is consensus and "distant genetic relationship" for those which lack consensus, whether due to lack of documentation, lack of scholarship, or time depth thought by linguists too great for accurate reconstruction, but which

linguistic method developed by J. Greenberg to determine genetic relatedness between languages, now generally regarded as misleading

Paleolinguistics is a term used by some linguists for the study of the distant human past by linguistic means. For most historical linguists there is no separate field of paleolinguistics. Those who use the term are generally advocates of hypotheses not generally accepted by mainstream historical linguists, a group colloquially referred to as "long-rangers".

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