While the modern languages found in Mongolia, Korea and Japan may not have much in common today, evidence drawn from linguistics, archaeology and genetics have combined to reveal a 10,000-year journey through eastern Asia. Some researchers now say the spread of these languages tracks closely to the development and proliferation of crops like millet and rice.
“The root of this language family lies exactly at the beginning of agriculture,” says Martine Robbeets, a linguist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany.
The very existence of a Transeurasian language group has been controversial since scholars first proposed that the language groups of Japanese, Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic may stem from a single, ancient language source. For decades, researchers argued over whether similar language roots are due to linear evolution or whether they simply represent words borrowed from other languages — and fierce debate remains on this topic even today.
