Nostratic
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proposed superfamily of Eurasian and African languages
Key facts
- Geographic distribution
- Europe , Asia except for the southeast , North and Northeast Africa , the Arctic
- Linguistic classification
- Hypothetical macrofamily
- Glottolog
- None
- Notes
- † indicates a dead language
via Wikipedia infobox
~19 min read
Encyclopedic overview
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A phylogenetic representation of Nostratic proposed by Allan Bomhard in 2008 Nostratic is a hypothetical language macrofamily including many of the language families of northern Eurasia first proposed in 1903. Though the Nostratic hypothesis once had a measure of support among mainstream linguists, it is now generally considered a fringe theory with very low support. The exact composition of languages families included in Nostrastic varies based on proponent; it typically includes the Kartvelian, Indo-European, and the controversial Ural-Altaic family, as well as the Afroasiatic languages, and the hypothetical Elamo-Dravidian languages.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Nostratic” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.