Karasuk is a language family proposed by George van Driem^[1] of the University of Leiden that links the Yeniseian languages of central Siberia with the Burushaski language of nothern Pakistan. It has been suggested that Western Siberia be merged into this article or section. ... Current distribution of Human Language Families A language family is a group of related languages said to have descended from a common proto-language. ... The Yenisei-Ostyak language family is spoken in central Siberia. ... Burushaski is a language isolate spoken by some 87,000 (as of 2000) Burusho people in the Hunza, Nagar, Yasin, and parts of the Gilgit valleys in northern Pakistan and Kashmir. ... Current distribution of Human Language Families A language family is a group of related languages said to have descended from a common proto-language. ... Leiden University in the city of Leiden, is the oldest university in the Netherlands. ... The Yenisei-Ostyak language family is spoken in central Siberia. ... Burushaski is a language isolate spoken by some 87,000 (as of 2000) Burusho people in the Hunza, Nagar, Yasin, and parts of the Gilgit valleys in northern Pakistan and Kashmir. ...

The family is named after the Karasuk culture, which existed in Central Asia during the Bronze Age in second millennium BCE. Van Driem postulates the Burusho people took part in the Indo-Aryan migration out of Central Asia that resulted in the Indo-European conquest of the Indian sub-continent, while other Karasuk peoples migrated northwards to become the Yenisei. These claims have recently been picked up by linguist Roger Blench.^{[citation needed]} The Karasuk culture is a name given by archaeologists to a group of Bronze Age societies who lived in southern Siberia and Kazakhstan during the later second millennium BC. They succeeded the Andronovo culture in this region and were farmers who primarily raised sheep and may have been the first... Map of Central Asia showing three sets of possible boundaries for the region Central Asia located as a region of the world Central Asia is a vast landlocked region of Asia. ... The Bronze Age is a period in a civilizations development when the most advanced metalworking has developed the techniques of smelting copper from natural outcroppings and alloys it to cast bronze. ... The Burusho (or Burushas) are an ethnic group living in northeastern Pakistan, most of whom inhabit the Hunza Valley. ... This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims. ... The Indian subcontinent is the peninsular region of larger South Asia in which the nations of India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka as well as parts of Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar and some disputed territory currently controlled by China are located. ... Kets (Кеты in Russian) are Siberian people that speak Ket language. ...

The evidence for Karasuk is mostly morphological. For example, the second-person singular prefixes on intransitive verbs are [gu-, gó-] in Burushaski and [ku-, gu-] in Ket. Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to the participant role of a referent, such as the speaker, the addressee, and others. ... The Ket language, formerly known as Yenisei Ostyak, is a Siberian language isolate, the sole surviving language of a Yeniseian language family, spoken along the middle Yenisei Basin by the Kets. ...

Although Van Driem apparently does not endorse the Dene-Caucasian proposal, which traditionally includes both Yeniseian and Burushaski, his Karasuk proposal will need to be considered when evaluating such claims. The Dené-Caucasian (also called Sino-Caucasian or Dené-Sino-Caucasian) language family is a proposed language superfamily containing at least the Basque, Caucasian, Yeniseian, Burushaski, Sino-Tibetan, and Na-Dené languages. ...

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