CDS (I) 2020 General Knowledge · Question 90 of 120

Correct — D, Altaic. The great majority of Central Asians speak Turkic languages — Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz and Turkmen among them — and Turkic is the largest of the three families traditionally grouped together as Altaic, alongside Mongolic and Tungusic. The grouping takes its name from the Altai mountains, which sit at roughly the geographical centre of the three, and its speakers spread across Northern, Eastern and Central Asia. On that reckoning Central Asia is Altaic country, and the key follows the classification used in Indian textbooks. One qualification belongs in an honest card: modern linguistics has moved away from treating Altaic as a genuine family. Most linguists now regard it as obsolete as a genetic grouping and attribute the resemblances to long contact — a sprachbund rather than common descent — while a significant academic minority still argues for the family. The name remains the standard label for the region's languages even where the genetic claim is doubted.

• (a)Indo-European — Present in Central Asia but not dominant. Tajik is a variety of Persian and therefore Indo-European, and Russian is widely used as a second language, but the Turkic-speaking populations of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan far outnumber them.
• (b)Sino-Tibetan — The family of Chinese, Tibetan and Burmese, dominant to the east and south-east of Central Asia rather than within it. Its presence in the region is marginal.
• (c)Austric — The Austroasiatic and Austronesian languages of South-East Asia, the Pacific and the Munda and Khasi speech communities of India. It has no presence in Central Asia at all.

Altaic was proposed as a major family joining Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic, with some scholars extending it to Korean and Japanese under the label Macro-Altaic. Its members share features such as agglutinative word-building and vowel harmony. Those shared features are now widely explained by centuries of contact across the steppe rather than by descent from one ancestor, and the label survives more as a convenient regional heading than as an accepted genetic claim.

The item is answerable from the political map. Four of the five Central Asian republics — Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan — are Turkic-speaking, and only Tajikistan speaks an Indo-European language. That is the whole argument. Two cautions are worth carrying. First, do not read the Russian presence as making the region Indo-European; Russian is a language of wider communication there, not the majority mother tongue. Second, be ready for the classification itself to be questioned, because a paper may ask whether Altaic is a family or an areal grouping, and the current scholarly position is that the resemblances are best explained by convergence.

• The Altaic grouping comprises Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic; the Macro-Altaic version adds Korean and Japanese and is more contested.
• Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz and Turkmen are Turkic languages; Tajik is a variety of Persian and therefore Indo-European.
• The grouping is named after the Altai mountains, roughly the geographical centre of the three families.
• Most linguists now treat Altaic as an areal convergence zone, or sprachbund, rather than a genetic family, though a significant minority disagrees.
• Shared traits such as agglutination and vowel harmony are the features on which the original grouping rested.

• Counting Russian speakers and concluding that Central Asia is Indo-European.
• Forgetting Tajikistan, the one Central Asian republic whose national language is Indo-European.
• Presenting Altaic as a settled family; the current consensus treats it as an areal grouping.

As a region-to-language-family identification, or as a matching set of languages and the families they belong to.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following Central Asian national languages is NOT a Turkic language?

  • (a)Kazakh
  • (b)Uzbek
  • (c)Tajik
  • (d)Turkmen

  Answer(c) Tajik — a variety of Persian and therefore Indo-European; the other three are Turkic.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Altaic grouping traditionally comprises which of the following?

  • (a)Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic
  • (b)Turkic, Slavic and Iranian
  • (c)Mongolic, Sinitic and Tibetan
  • (d)Tungusic, Dravidian and Munda

  Answer(a) Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic — with Korean and Japanese added only in the more contested Macro-Altaic version.