Eurasiatic Languages
Eurasiatic is a language macrofamily proposed by Joseph Greenberg that includes many language families historically spoken in northern Eurasia. The eight branches of Eurasiatic are Etruscan, Indo-European, Uralic–Yukaghir, Altaic, Korean-Japanese-Ainu, Gilyak, Chukotian, and Eskimo–Aleut, spoken in northernmost North America and Greenland with a toehold in easternmost Siberia.
Some proposals would group Eurasiatic with even larger macrofamilies such as Nostratic or Borean, but neither they nor Eurasiatic itself have been widely accepted, since they are not seen by the linguistic profession as being based on valid methodologies. The mass comparison method used by Greenberg remains controversial. Merritt Ruhlen and other supporters of the Eurasiatic proposal have held that the language families it includes have a distinctive grammatical pattern involving the use of a -t suffix to form plurals and a -k suffix to form duals.
Read more about Eurasiatic Languages: Reception, Grammatical Evidence, Roots, External Classification, Subdivision, Geographical Distribution
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... Merritt Ruhlen suggests that the geographical distribution of Eurasiatic shows that it and the Dené–Caucasian family are the result of separate migrations ... Dené–Caucasian is the older of the two groups, with the emergence of Eurasiatic being more recent ... The Eurasiatic expansion overwhelmed Dené–Caucasian, leaving speakers of the latter restricted mainly to isolated pockets (the Basques in the Pyrenees mountains, Caucasian peoples in the ...
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