Macro-Siouan Hypothesis

Macro-Siouan hypothesis, a proposal, now mostly abandoned, of a distant family relationship (phylum, macro-family, or superstock) that would group together languages in North America of the Siouan, Iroquoian, and Caddoan language families and the language isolate Yuchi. Earlier versions of the hypothesis had linked only Siouan and Iroquoian, to which Caddoan and Yuchi were added later. The proposal is best known from the work of American linguist Wallace Chafe in the 1960s and ’70s. The evidence he presented in favour of the proposed linguistic kinship is held to be unpersuasive by most linguists, who believe that most of the evidence may be explained as accidental similarities, borrowings, and so on, rather than by inheritance from an earlier common ancestor language.