| Martine Robbeets | |
| Birth Name: | Martine Irma Robbeets |
| Birth Date: | 24 October 1972 |
| Birth Place: | Bruges, Belgium[1] |
| Nationality: | Belgian |
| Occupation: | Linguist |
| Alma Mater: | Leiden University |
| Workplaces: | Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and University of Mainz |
| Main Interests: | Historical linguistics |
| Notable Ideas: | Transeurasian languages hypothesis |
Martine Irma Robbeets (24 October 1972) is a Belgian comparative linguist and japanologist. She is known for the Transeurasian languages hypothesis, which groups the Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic languages together into a single language family.
Robbeets received a Ph.D. in Comparative Linguistics from Leiden University, and also received a master's degree in Korean studies from Leiden University. She also holds a master's degree in Japanese studies from KU Leuven.
In addition to being a lecturer at the University of Mainz, she is also a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany.[2]
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. A group of those proto-Altaic ("Transeurasian") speakers would have migrated south into the modern Liaoning 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.[3] [4]
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.[5]