Research Focus Area

Evolution of Human Languages

The Dene-Caucasian Hypothesis

John Bengtson, Association for the Study of Language In Prehistory
Sergei Starostin, Russian State University for the Humanities

This collaborative project deals with the development and testing of the Dene-Caucasian (Sino-Caucasian) hypothesis. This is the hypothesis that certain language families and language “isolates” of Eurasia and North America share a deep genetic connection.

In Sergei Starostin’s formulation of the hypothesis in the 1980’s the North Caucasian, Sino-Tibetan, and Yeniseian language families make up the Sino-Caucasian macro-family. The beginnings of this macro-family, or parts of it, were discovered by some adventurous linguists (especially Alfredo Trombetti, Karl Bouda, Edward Sapir) throughout the Twentieth Century. Starostin was the first to scientifically demonstrate that these families shared a significant amount of basic vocabulary, and that these lexical comparisons were not chance resemblances because they were connected by systematic phonological correspondences (“sound laws”) between and among the three families.

Around the same time Starostin’s colleague, Sergei L. Nikolayev, made a similar comparison between the Na-Dene family (as proposed by Sapir) and the Sino-Caucasian macro-family of Starostin. After this the term “Dene-Caucasian” came into use to describe the expanded macro-family. In the late 1980’s John Bengtson began to work on the Dene-Caucasian hypothesis, focusing mainly on Na-Dene, Burushaski, and Basque. His work on Basque, along with that of Vyacheslav Chirikba, generated a good deal of discussion, much of which was published in the new journal Mother Tongue (1995). In the 1996 issue of the same journal, Starostin summarized his opinion regarding Basque as follows: “The uncertainty of comparative phonology is the only factor that still keeps me from enthusiastically including Basque in Sino-Caucasian (or Dene-Caucasian).”

The current phase of Bengtson's work is to codify the historical phonology of the Basque language and its systematic correspondences with the Caucasian proto-language, as reconstructed by Nikolayev and Starostin. He is currently working on a paper that will document the correspondences of consonants, vowels, and syllabic structures, supported by more than three hundred lexical comparisons. Though much remains to be done, this paper will be a step toward the full membership of Basque in the Dene-Caucasian macro-family.