Language Families
Nostratic
Proposed Groupings
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A proposed macro-family joining Indo-European to Afro-Asiatic, Uralic, Dravidian and others at a depth of ten thousand years or more. Its advocates form a real school with published reconstructions; most historical linguists hold that the comparative method cannot reach that far back and that the resemblances offered fall within chance.
Facts
Disputed
Homeland HypothesisIts proponents have placed it in the Near East around the end of the last glacial period, which would make it far older than any demonstrated family. Its critics hold that at that time depth the evidence cannot be told apart from chance resemblance, so there is nothing to place. 1 Nostratic's proponents, working from shared vocabulary and grammatical elements across Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic (in its various proposed forms), Kartvelian and Dravidian, have placed a common ancestor in the Near East around the end of the last glacial period, roughly twelve thousand years ago, which would make it several times older than any family demonstrated by the standard comparative method. Salmons and Joseph's 1998 volume places advocates and critics together specifically because the disagreement is foundational rather than a dispute over detail: critics hold that at a time depth this great, the comparative method's normal test for distinguishing inherited cognates from chance resemblance and later borrowing no longer functions, so that even the shared material proponents point to cannot be shown to indicate a real ancestor rather than coincidence. If the critics are right, there is no homeland to locate because there is no demonstrated family to have had one. The dispute has not moved because both sides are reading the same assembled evidence through a disagreement over whether the comparative method retains any power at this remove, a methodological question no new vocabulary list by itself can settle. Classification StatusA proposed macro-family joining Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Uralic, Dravidian, Kartvelian and Altaic. Not accepted by most historical linguists. 1 The camps are the Moscow school founded by Vladislav Illich-Svitych and Aharon Dolgopolsky, together with Allan Bomhard working independently, against the majority position that the comparative method loses resolution long before the depth Nostratic requires and that the proposed cognate sets fall inside the range of chance resemblance. The 1998 volume Nostratic: Sifting the Evidence puts both sides in one book. Attestation
Earliest AttestationNone, and none is possible in principle. Nostratic is a proposal about relationships among families rather than a language with a record, and its reconstructions are extrapolated from the proto-languages of the families it would group. 1 Learn More
A Proposal at the Edge of Method
Nostratic proposes that Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Uralic, Dravidian, Kartvelian and Altaic all descend from a single ancestor spoken perhaps twelve to fifteen thousand years ago. It was developed in the Soviet Union in the 1960s by Vladislav Illich-Svitych and Aharon Dolgopolsky, and has been pursued since by a school in Moscow and, on a somewhat different basis, by Allan Bomhard working in the United States. Its advocates have published reconstructed roots and proposed sound correspondences, which is more than most long-range proposals offer. The majority position rejects it, and the objection is methodological rather than a matter of taste.
The comparative method works by identifying regular sound correspondences in basic vocabulary, and its resolution decays with time, because sounds keep changing and words keep being replaced. Somewhere between eight and ten thousand years the signal falls below the level at which chance resemblance between unrelated languages produces the same number of apparent matches. Critics hold that Nostratic operates past that horizon, and that its cognate sets are indistinguishable from noise. Whether a deeper relationship exists is a separate question from whether it can be demonstrated.
The Uses a Macro-Family Gets Put To
This entry sits in a religion atlas mainly as a caution, and the caution is worth stating plainly. Deep language groupings get borrowed, repeatedly, to argue for an original religion of humanity or of some large ancestral population, on the reasoning that if the languages descend from one source then so, presumably, do the beliefs of their speakers. Neither half of that inference survives inspection. The linguistic premise is contested at exactly the depth the argument needs it. And even where a family is beyond dispute, as Indo-European is, comparative work recovers words rather than beliefs, and it recovers them without dates, so the reconstruction of a shared religious vocabulary at a depth of five thousand years is already a stretched piece of work.
At three times that depth nothing survives to compare. The same warning applies to a related family of claims, which use proposed macro-families to attach a modern population to a prestigious ancient one. The atlas records Nostratic accurately, with its advocates named and its status marked, precisely so that a reader meeting the word in a book about ancient wisdom can find out what the linguists actually think and decide for themselves.
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