(LANGUAGE HISTORY) How closely is the Kazakh (and other central Asian languages) related to the languages of northern native First Nation tribes considering they were their predecessor.

by llamas_in_space

So me and my girlfriend, who is Kazakh, have been talking about how similar Nations like the Inuits are to central asians. She has seen videos of the spoken inuit and agrees it sound somewhat similar to kazakh minus the harshness on the throat.

Is any of this founded or is this a classic case of correlation not causation?

limetom

Kazakh is a Turkic language, related to other Turkic languages like Turkish, Chuvash, Khalaj, Uyghur, and Sakha. From multiple lines of evidence, including the earliest Turkic inscriptions, as well as records of Turkic peoples in Chinese histories, we know that the Turkic peoples originated more or less in modern Mongolia. There are some fringe theories that claim Turkic languages are related to Mongolic and Tungusic languages in a so-called Altaic language family (or even higher level groupings), but none of these are accepted by mainstream historical linguists.

Inuit is an Eskimo-Aleut language, whose other members include Aleut, spoken in the Aleutian Islands, as well as the Inuit dialect chain (in which neighbors can understand one another, but the varieties at the extremes are incomprehensible), which ranges from Tunumiit on the east coast of Greenland to IƱupiat on the north and northwestern coast of Alaska; and also several Yupik languages, spoken in west and southwest Alaska, as well as on the Chukotka Peninsula, in the Russian Far Eat. These languages do not have any higher level relationships that have had any kind of acceptance.

So to answer in brief, Kazakh and Inuit have no demonstrable relationship to one another.

What may be going on is that there are several sounds that are somewhat uncommon in the world's languages, uvular consonants, common to both Kazakh and Inuit, perhaps not common to many other languages you have heard.

Dtnoip30

You can also try /r/linguistics and /r/AskAnthropology