Vasco-Caucasian languages

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Vasco-Caucasian is a hypothetical language family or phylum whose extant members are Basque, Northwest Caucasian (Abkhaz-Adyghe), Northeast Caucasian (Nakh-Daghestani) and Burushaski, but not Kartvelian (South Caucasian). Although first proposed by John Bengtson, it had a precedent in the "Asianitic" group proposed by the Polish geographer Bogdan Zaborski c. 1970.

Extinct languages such as Hurro-Urartian, Hattic, Etruscan and Iberian have also been proposed to belong to Vasco-Caucasian, which is an extension of Sergei Starostin's North Caucasian family (which groups together NEC and NWC) and in turn is part of a larger Dene-Caucasian group also including Sino-Tibetan and Yeniseian.

Octavià Alexandre is an adherent of this hypothesis, but most linguists do not consider the evidence sufficient. That doesn't mean that it is wrong; but if these languages are related to each other, the time depth probably exceeds the range of the current comparative method.

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