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Hello Wikipedians! I'm editing this to be more of a catch all article to replace both Macrofamily, which right now is quite small, and a lot of the individual articles for these languages. My hope here is to redo the macrofamily page into a wider discussion of long-range historical linguistics, some of the challenges which are general to all of these proposals, some places some of them have seen some success, etc. I think that for proposals with either wider degrees of acceptance (Dené–Yeniseian, for example) or historical importance (Altaic, Nostratic) that the article for those is warranted, though needs to be handled carefully. I intend on working on this here until it's an effective draft, then moving it to the Linguistics wikiproject for continued work. That said, anyone is welcome to edit this to help improve it. This is a substantial undertaking!
Please note that my use of tables here is just to visually offset each infobox into its own section before content is added to each. Without this the infoboxes all clump up, so feel free to remove it from whatever section actually has content.
Proposed genetic relationship grouping together language families
In historical linguistics, a macrofamily, also called a superfamily or phylum, is a proposed genetic relationship grouping together language families (also isolates) in a larger scale classification.[1][2] However, some linguists[3] regard this term as superfluous, preferring "language family" for those classifications for which there is consensus. Thus, a macrofamily proposal which becomes widely accepted is generally just referred to as a language family.
Research into macrofamilies can be seen as a direct continuation of the work which lead to the grouping of families in the first place. The addition of individual languages to a family (as was the case historically with Armenian, generally is not considered as creating a new macrofamily, rather joining of previously-considered disparate families are, though this line can be heavily blurred by a single "language" actually being its own small family, as with Italian.[citation needed]
Macrofamily proposals have been both a highly fruitful area of linguistic research and one prone to pseudoscience, particularly since the latter half of the 20th century, when the use of the comparative method became standardized. This relationship is made even more challenging by macrofamily proposals falling out of favour, such as Altaic, while still having scholarly support from a small minority.[citation needed] This creates a situation where the historical literature can present a theory as fact or widely accepted when contemporary understanding has either rejected it outright or determined that the evidence does not exist at present to demonstrate a relationship.[4]
Several major proposals for macrofamlies have seen widespread contemporary or historical support, and represent the the work of a large number of linguists working in tandem to understand the validity of a proposal. Other macrofamily proposals are the result of either individual researchers or small groups of researchers working in tandem. Limited amount of research into a given proposal does not necessarily invalidate it; many genetic relationships are challenging to explore without a high degree of familiarity with multiple of the proposed family members, which very few people possess. As a result, many linguists take a firmly agnostic stance on new macrofamily proposals until suitable domain experts can publish on the topic. [citation needed]
Many of these proposals have been rejected outright for methodological problems, particularly when incomplete dictionaries, previously rejected language family proposals (such as Nostratic taking the existence of Altaic as a given), and mass comparison are utilized.[citation needed] Others represent narrow domain knowledge and haven't been subject to enough scrutiny for many linguists to take a firm stance on.[citation needed]
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