Eurasiatic Languages - External Classification

External Classification

According to Greenberg, the language family that Eurasiatic is most closely connected to is Amerind. He states that "he Eurasiatic-Amerind family represents a relatively recent expansion (circa 15,000 BP) into territory opened up by the melting of the Arctic ice cap" (2002:2). In contrast, "Eurasiatic-Amerind stands apart from the other families of the Old World, among which the differences are much greater and represent deeper chronological groupings" (ib.). Like Eurasiatic, Amerind is not a generally accepted proposal.

Eurasiatic and Nostratic include many of the same language families. Vladislav Illich-Svitych's Nostratic dictionary did not include the smaller Siberian language families listed in Eurasiatic, but this was only because protolanguages had not been reconstructed for them; Nostraticists have not attempted to exclude these languages from Nostratic. Most recently, Nostraticists have accepted Eurasiatic as a subgroup within Nostratic (2005:331) with Afroasiatic, Kartvelian, and Dravidian forming the rest of Nostratic. There continues to be disagreement over details of classification. Murray Gell-Mann, Ilia Peiros, and Georgiy Starostin (2009) group Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Nivkh with Almosan instead of Eurasiatic.

The Nostratic family is not endorsed by the mainstream of comparative linguistics.

Harold C. Fleming includes Eurasiatic as a subgroup of the hypothetical Borean family, but this group does not have widespread acceptance in scholarship.