Altaic Languages

Altaic languages, group of languages consisting of three language families—Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu-Tungus—that show noteworthy similarities in vocabulary, morphological and syntactic structure, and certain phonological features. Some, but not all, scholars of those languages argue for their genetic relationship based on putative systematic sound correspondences, while the consensus among general linguists is that this hypothesis is at best speculative and by no means proven. The group contains more than 50 languages, spoken by more than 135 million people spread across virtually the entire breadth of Asia and from the Arctic Ocean to the latitude of Beijing. The Turkic languages are spoken principally in a nearly continuous band from Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan through the Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan to Xinjiang in China. The Mongolian languages are concentrated in the adjacent, roughly oval region formed by Buryatiya, Mongolia, and Inner Mongolia (China). The Manchu-Tungus languages are spoken by widely dispersed populations farther to the north and east—that is, across Siberia in Russia and in the Northeast in China.