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Ural-Altaic languages
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Some linguists propose the Ural-Altaic grouping of the Altaic languages (Turkish, Mongolian, Kazakh, Uzbek, Tatar, Manchu, etc., plus perhaps Korean and Japanese) and Uralic languages (Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian mostly) into one language group. This theory is debated and since nowdays even existence of Altaic language family as genetical relatives is highly controversial, the whole Ural-Altaic theory has faced strong criticism among linguistics.

This proposed language family and the speakers are also known as the Turanian. The term derives from the Persia word for places beyond the Oxus, Turān.

Both groups follow the principle of vowel harmony, are agglutinative (stringing suffixes, prefixes or both onto a single root) and lack any way for expressing grammatical gender (see noun case). However this is not necessarely proof for genetic relationship and the vocabulary of both groups does not correspond, except for borrowings.

The Mongolic languages, are group of languages spoken in Central Asia. Some linguistics propose Mongolian languages together with Turkic (of which Turkish is a member) and Tungusic, as member of Altaic languages, but this is not universally agreed.

The best-known member of this language family, Mongolian is the primary language of most of the residents of Mongolia. The majority of speakers speak the Khalkha dialect. It is also spoken in some of the surrounding areas in provinces of China and the Russian Federation. Mongolian has been written in a variety of alphabets over the years.

The official Mongolian alphabet was created in the 12th century, although it has undergone transformations and occasionally been supplanted by other scripts since then. The Mongolian alphabet had been used in Mongolia until 1943, when it switched to the Cyrillic alphabet, and Cyrillic is still the most common script found in Mongolia today, while the traditional alphabet is currently being slowly reintroduced in the public school system.

Related languages include Kalmyk spoken near the Caspian Sea and Buryat of East Siberia, as well as a number of minor languages in China and the Moghol of Afghanistan. If the Ural-Altaic hypothesis is true, Mongolian is also a distant relative of Hungarian, Finnish, Sami, and Estonian.

See also: Languages of China