Eskimo-Aleut Languages - Position Among The World's Language Families

Position Among The World's Language Families

Eskimo–Aleut does not have any genetic relationship to any of the world's other language families that is generally accepted by linguists at the present time. There is general agreement that it is not closely related to the other language families of North America. The more credible proposals on the external relations of Eskimo–Aleut all concern one or more of the language families of northern Eurasia, such as Chukchi–Kamchatkan just across the Bering Strait. One of the first such proposals was made by the pioneering Danish linguist Rasmus Rask in 1818, upon noticing similarities between Greenlandic Eskimo and Finnish. Perhaps the most fully developed such proposal to date is Michael Fortescue's Uralo-Siberian hypothesis, published in 1998. More recently Joseph Greenberg (2000–2002) suggested grouping Eskimo–Aleut with all of the language families of northern Eurasia, with the exception of Yeniseian, in a proposed language family called Eurasiatic. Such proposals are not generally accepted.

In the 1960s Swadesh suggested a connection with the Wakashan languages. This was picked up and expanded by Holst (2005).