Nostratic languages

Nostratic is a proposed macrofamily hypothesized to unite several language families across Eurasia and North Africa. Its status and proposed membership remain disputed.

Holger Pedersen: A Danish linguist who proposed the name Nostratic and argued for distant relationships among Eurasian languages. Pedersen introduced the macrofamily’s name and early comparative proposal.
Indo-European languages: A language family including English, Hindi, Persian, Greek, and many other languages. Nostratic proposals commonly place Indo-European within the macrofamily.
Proto-language: A reconstructed or documented ancestral language from which a group of languages developed. Proto-Nostratic is proposed as an ancestor above the established proto-languages.
Language isolate: A language with no demonstrated genealogical relationship to any other known language. Isolates show that similarities do not always establish membership in a larger family.
Long-range comparison: The comparison of languages or families across very deep timescales to identify possible common ancestry. Nostratic is a prominent case in debates over whether deep comparison can be rigorous.
Vladislav Illich-Svitych: A Soviet linguist who developed a systematic reconstruction of Proto-Nostratic during the twentieth century. His comparative work made Nostratic a detailed reconstruction project.
Uralic languages: A family including Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian, and several languages of northern Eurasia. Uralic is among the families most often included in Nostratic proposals.
Sound law: A regular pattern of sound change affecting a language or related languages over time. Regular sound correspondences are central to testing proposed Nostratic cognates.
Eurasiatic languages: A proposed macrofamily linking several northern Eurasian language families, with membership varying by author. Eurasiatic overlaps with Nostratic but usually proposes a different scope and classification.
Proto-World language: A hypothetical ancestral language proposed as the source of all or most human languages. Claims for Nostratic raise broader questions about how far linguistic ancestry can be traced.

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