Ralf-Stefan Georg (November 7, 1962 in Bottrop) is a German linguist. He is currently Professor at the University of Bonn in Bonn, Germany, for Altaic Linguistics and Culture Studies.

Education

Georg earned an M.A. in Mongolian Linguistics, Indo-European and Semitic Linguistics at Bonn University (1990), and later completed his Ph.D. (Central Asian Studies, Indo-European and Manchu Studies), with a descriptive grammar of the Thakali language (a Tibeto-Burman language of Mustang in Mid-Western Nepal), at the same institution (1995).

Research

Since 1992, Georg has been engaged in linguistic fieldwork and the writing of descriptive grammars of unwritten/endangered/understudied languages. Apart from a grammar of a Thakali dialect, he has co-authored a grammar of Itelmen (Chukchi–Kamchatkan language family) and written a grammar of Ket (Yeniseian languages), as well as shorter grammatical descriptions of Ordos Mongolian and Huzhu Mongghul (a variety of the so-called Monguor group). He has published widely on problems of language classification, especially on the controversy surrounding the Altaic hypothesis (the putative genetic relationship between the Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic language families to which Korean and Japanese are sometimes added). He belongs to the critics of this hypothesis and argues for a non-genetic, areal interpretation of the commonalities between these languages. Other fields of interest he is active in include Palaeosiberian languages, Tibeto-Burman languages, Indo-European and Kartvelian linguistics and linguistic typology.

Publications