Dravido-Koreanic, sometimes Dravido-Koreo-Japonic, is an obsolete proposal which links the Dravidian languages to Korean and to Japanese. A genetic link between the Dravidian languages and Korean was first hypothesized by Homer B. Hulbert in 1905. The hypothesis later gained "popularity" as a result of the work of Morgan E. Clippinger in his "Korean and Dravidian: lexical evidence for an old theory", published in 1984, and Susumu Ōno in his "The origin of the Japanese language" in 1970.
Similarities between the Dravidian languages and Korean were first noted by French missionaries in Korea. In 1905, Homer B. Hulbert wrote a comparative grammar of Korean and Dravidian in which he hypothesized a genetic connection between the two. Susumu Ōno caused a stir in Japan with his theory that Tamil constituted a lexical stratum of both Korean and Japanese, which was widely publicized in the 1980s but quickly abandoned. However, Clippinger's method was professional and his data reliable; hence, Ki-Moon Lee, Professor Emeritus at Seoul National University, opines that his conclusion could not be ignored and that it should be revisited. According to Homer B. Hulbert, many of the names of ancient cities of southern Korea were the exact counterpart of Dravidian words. For example, the Karak Kingdom of King Suro was named after the proto-Dravidian meaning fish. Samguk yusa describes Heo Hwang-ok who was the first queen of the Geumgwan Gaya — which was a statelet of the Gaya confederacy — came from India's Ayuta kingdom. However, given its mythical narratives, historical reliability of Samguk yusa is questionable. In 2011, Jung Nam Kim, president of the Korean Society of Tamil Studies, mentioned that the similarities between Korean and Dravidian are strong, but he also said that this does not prove a genetic link between Dravidian and Korean, and that more research needs to be done.
Arguments
, and Homer B. Hulbert propose that early Dravidian people, especially Tamils, migrated to the Korean peninsula and Japan. Clippinger presents 408 cognates and about 60 phonological correspondences. Clippinger found that some cognates were closer than others leading him to speculate a genetic link which was reinforced by a later migration. The Japanese professor Tsutomu Kambe found more than 500 similar cognates between Tamil and Japanese. There are two basic common features:
all three follow SOV word order, and consequently modifiers always precede modified words and particles are post-positional.
However, typological similarities such as these could easily be due to chance; agglutinative languages are quite common, and half of the languages in the world follow SOV word order. The lack of a statistically significant number of cognates and the lack of anthropological and genetic links can be adduced to dismiss this proposal. Comparative linguist Kang Gil-un found 1300 Dravidian Tamil cognates in Korean. He insisted that the Korean language is based on the Nivkh language and was influenced later.
