Rujukan terawal yang diketahui menyatukan kumpulan bahasa jenis Turki, Mongol dan Tungus ini adalah daripada karya Nicholaes Witsen (1692) yang mungkin didasarkan kepada karya Abu al-Ghazi Bahadur (1661) berjudul "Genealogy of the Turkmens".
A proposed grouping of the Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages was published in 1730 by Philip Johan von Strahlenberg, a Swedish officer who traveled in the eastern Russian Empire while a prisoner of war after the Great Northern War.[21]: page 125 However, he may not have intended to imply a closer relationship among those languages.[22] Later proposals to include the Korean and Japanese languages into a "Macro-Altaic" family have always been controversial. The original proposal was sometimes called "Micro-Altaic" by retronymy. According to Blench & Dendo (2008), most proponents of Altaic continue to support the inclusion of Korean, but fewer do for Japanese.[23] Some proposals also included Ainuic but this is not widely accepted even among Altaicists themselves.[3] A common ancestral Proto-Altaic language for the "Macro" family has been tentatively reconstructed by Sergei Starostin and others.[24]
Micro-Altaic includes about 66 living languages,[25] to which Macro-Altaic would add Korean, Jeju, Japanese, and the Ryukyuan languages, for a total of about 74 (depending on what is considered a language and what is considered a dialect). These numbers do not include earlier states of languages, such as Middle Mongol, Old Korean, or Old Japanese.
