Editing Hunnic language (section)

===Turkic or Altaic ''sprachbund''===
A number of historians and linguists including [[Karl Heinrich Menges]], and [[Omeljan Pritsak]] feel that the proper names only allow the Hunnic language to be positioned in relationship to the [[Altaic languages|Altaic language group]], which is itself a widely discredited language family.{{sfn|Menges|1995|p=17}} Although Menges was reserved towards the language evidence, his view of the Huns was that "there are [[Ethnology|ethnological]] reasons for considering them Turkic or close to the Turks".{{sfn|Menges|1995|p=17}} As further possibilities, Menges suggests that the Huns could have spoken a [[Mongolian languages|Mongolian]] or [[Tungusic languages|Tungusic language]], or possibly a language between Mongolian and Turkic.{{sfn|Menges|1995|p=17}} Pritsak analyzed 33 surviving Hunnic personal names and concluded: "It was not a Turkic language, but one between Turkic and [[Mongolian language|Mongolian]], probably closer to the former than the latter. The language had strong ties to [[Bulgar language]] and to modern [[Chuvash language|Chuvash]], but also had some important connections, especially lexical and morphological, to [[Ottoman Turkish language|Ottoman Turkish]] and [[Yakut language|Yakut]]".{{sfn|Pritsak|1982|p=470}}

According to Savelyev-Jeong (2020), the "traditional and prevailing view is [...] that the Xiongnu and/or the Huns were Turkic or at least Altaic" speakers.{{sfn|Savelyev|Jeong|2020}} [[Otto Maenchen-Helfen]] argues that many tribal and proper names among the Huns appear to have originated in Turkic languages, indicating that the language was Turkic.{{sfn|Maenchen-Helfen|1973|p=392–411}} [[Hyun Jin Kim]] similarly concluded that it "seems highly likely then from the names that we do know, most of which seem to be Turkic, that the Hunnic elite was predominantly Turkic-speaking".{{sfn|Kim|2013|p=30}} Denis Sinor, while skeptical of our ability to classify Hunnic as a whole, states that part of the Hunnish elite likely spoke Turkic, though he notes that some Hunnic names cannot be Turkic in origin.{{sfn|Sinor|1990|p=202}} The historian Peter Heather, while he supported the Turkic hypothesis as the "best guess" in 1995,{{sfn|Heather|1995|p=5}} has since voiced skepticism,{{sfn|Heather|2005|p=148}} in 2010 saying that "the truth is that we don't know what language the Huns spoke, and probably never will".{{sfn|Heather|2010|p=209}} Savelyev and Jeong similarly note that "the majority of the previously proposed Turkic etymologies for the Hunnic names are far from unambiguous, so no firm conclusion can be drawn from this type of data."{{sfn|Savelyev|Jeong|2020}}