About: Turanian languages

Turanian is an obsolete language-family proposal subsuming most of the languages of Eurasia not included in Indo-European, Semitic and Chinese.During the 19th century, inspired by the establishment of the Indo-European family, scholars looked for similarly widespread families elsewhere.Building on the work of predecessors such as Rasmus Rask and Matthias Castrén, Max Müller proposed the Turanian grouping primarily on the basis of the incidence of agglutinative morphology, naming it after Turan, an ancient Persian term for the lands of Central Asia.The languages he included are now generally assigned to nine separate language families.