Martine Irma Robbeets (24 October 1972) is a Belgian comparative linguist and

japanologist , sometimes known as Japanology in Europe, is a sub-field of area studies or East Asian studies involved in social sciences and humanities research on Japan. It incorporates fields such as the study of Japanese language, History of Japan, history, ...

. She is known for the Transeurasian languages hypothesis, which groups the Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic languages together into a single

language family A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term ''family'' is a metaphor borrowed from biology, with the tree model used in historical linguistics ...

Education

Robbeets received a Ph.D. in Comparative Linguistics from

Leiden University Leiden University (abbreviated as ''LEI''; ) is a Public university, public research university in Leiden, Netherlands. Established in 1575 by William the Silent, William, Prince of Orange as a Protestantism, Protestant institution, it holds the d ...

, and also received a master's degree in Korean studies from

. She also holds a master's degree in Japanese studies from

KU Leuven KU Leuven (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) is a Catholic research university in the city of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium. Founded in 1425, it is the oldest university in Belgium and the oldest university in the Low Countries. In addition to its mai ...

Career and research

In addition to being a lecturer at the

University of Mainz The Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz () is a public research university in Mainz, Rhineland Palatinate, Germany. It has been named after the printer Johannes Gutenberg since 1946. it had approximately 32,000 students enrolled in around 100 a ...

, she is also a group leader at the

Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History The Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology () performs fundamental research into archaeological science. The institute is one of more than 80 research institutes of the Max Planck Society and is located in Jena, Germany. History Max Planc ...

Jena Jena (; ) is a List of cities and towns in Germany, city in Germany and the second largest city in Thuringia. Together with the nearby cities of Erfurt and Weimar, it forms the central metropolitan area of Thuringia with approximately 500,000 in ...

, Germany. In 2017, Robbeets proposed that Japanese (and possibly Korean) originated as a hybrid language. She proposed that the ancestral home of the Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages was somewhere in northwestern

Manchuria Manchuria is a historical region in northeast Asia encompassing the entirety of present-day northeast China and parts of the modern-day Russian Far East south of the Uda (Khabarovsk Krai), Uda River and the Tukuringra-Dzhagdy Ranges. The exact ...

. A group of those proto-Altaic ("Transeurasian") speakers would have migrated south into the modern

Liaoning ) , image_skyline = , image_alt = , image_caption = Clockwise: Mukden Palace in Shenyang, Xinghai Square in Dalian, Dalian coast, Yalu River at Dandong , image_map = Liaoning in China (+all claims hatched).svg , ...

province, where they would have been mostly assimilated by an agricultural community with an Austronesian-like language. The fusion of the two languages would have resulted in proto-Japanese and proto-Korean.Martine Irma Robbeets (2017):
Austronesian influence and Transeurasian ancestry in Japanese: A case of farming/language dispersal
. ''Language Dynamics and Change'', volume 7, issue 2, pages 201–251, Martine Irma Robbeets (2015): ''Diachrony of verb morphology – Japanese and the Transeurasian languages''. Mouton de Gruyter. In 2018, Robbeets and Bouckaert used Bayesian phylolinguistic methods to argue for the coherence of the Altaic languages, which they refer to as the Transeurasian languages.Robbeets, M.; Bouckaert, R.
Bayesian phylolinguistics reveals the internal structure of the Transeurasian family
''Journal of Language Evolution'' 3 (2), pp. 145 - 162 (2018) , Robbeets, Martine et al. 2021. Triangulation supports agricultural spread of the Transeurasian languages, Nature 599, 616–621.

Selected works

* Robbeets, M.; Savelyev, A. (eds.): ''The Oxford Guide to the Transeurasian Languages''. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2020) * Robbeets, M.; Savelyev, A.: ''Language dispersal beyond farming''. John Benjamins Publishing, Amsterdam (2017) * Robbeets, M.: ''Diachrony of verb morphology: Japanese and the Transeurasian languages''. de Gruyter Mouton, Berlin (2015) * Robbeets, M.; Bisang, W. (eds.): ''Paradigm change: in the Transeurasian languages and beyond''. Benjamins, Amsterdam (2014) * Robbeets, M.: ''Is Japanese related to Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic?'' Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden (2005)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Robbeets, Martine Living people Linguists of Altaic languages Historical linguists Linguists from Belgium Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History 1972 births Leiden University alumni Academic staff of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz