by YUEN REN CHAO,

Agassiz Professor of Oriental Languages and

Literature Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley

 

The Altaic family contains three branches: Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu-Tungus. The Turkic branch stretches over a vast area, from the Arctic Ocean in northern Siberia to the Mediterranean in Turkey and Cyprus. The important members of this family are Anatolian Turkish (25 million speakers), Uzbek (6 million), Kazakh (over 3 million), Kirghiz (1 million), and Azerbaijani (over 5 million), the last four all spoken in the Soviet Union, the last one also in Iran. In China's Sinkiang province there are over 4 million speakers of Uigur. The Mongolian branch is spoken in the Soviet Union, the Mongolian People's Republic, and in China by around 3 million people. Depending upon the fineness of distinction as to what constitutes a separate language, Mongolian has been divided into nine or four languages. In the latter case, the languages are Mogul, Monguor, Dagur, and the remaining forms of Mongolian, namely, Oirat, Khalkha, Buryat, Pao-an, Ordos, and Khorchin, would be considered dialects. The Manchu-Tungus branch consists of a group of minor languages such as Evenki, Lamut, Nanai, and Sibo, spoken in the U.S.S.R. and China.

 

Recently attempts have been made to place Korean in the Altaic family, but the question is still unsettled. It has also been suggested that the Altaic languages are to be grouped with Korean, Japanese, and Ainu to form one "North Asiatic" group, but their genetic relationship is still largely conjectural.

 

Japanese, spoken by over 100 million people in Japan and the Ryukyu Islands, most probably forms the only member of a family, though some scholars would set the language off as a separate branch. Korean is spoken by 34 million people in Korea and part of Manchuria; in grammar it is very similar to Japanese. As we have noted, the large-scale borrowing of Chinese words as well as Chinese writing into Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese is no proof of genetic relationship between Chinese and Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese or between any two of those languages.