Page "Altaic languages" Paragraph 7

For much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, many linguists who studied Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic regarded them as members of a common Ural – Altaic family, together with Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic, based on such shared features as vowel harmony and agglutination.

While the Ural – Altaic hypothesis can still be found in encyclopedias, atlases, and similar general references, it has not had any adherents in the linguistics community for decades.

It has been characterized by Sergei Starostin as " an idea now completely discarded ".