Allan R. Bomhard

Allan R. Bomhard is an American independent scholar publishing in the field of comparative linguistics. He is part of a small group of proponents of the Nostratic hypothesis, according to which the Indo-European languages, Uralic languages, Altaic languages, and Afroasiatic languages would all belong to a larger macrofamily. The theory is widely rejected by mainstream linguists as a fringe theory. Among Nostratists, he has been described as "a maximalist who casts his nets as widely as possible" among far-flung languages not generally believed to be related.

Russian linguists Georgiy Starostin, Mikhail Zhivlov, and Alexei Kassian have criticized his work as imprecise and "historically unrealistic".

Books

 * Toward Proto-Nostratic: A New Approach to the Comparison of Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Afroasiatic. Amsterdam:  John Benjamins, 1984.
 * Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis. Charleston: SIGNUM Desktop Publishing, 1996.
 * Reconstructing Proto-Nostratic: Comparative Phonology, Morphology, and Vocabulary.  Leiden and Boston: Brill.  2 vols, 2008.
 * The Nostratic Hypothesis in 2011: Trends and Issues. Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man, 2011.
 * An Introductory Grammar of the Pali Language. Charleston: Charleston Buddhist Fellowship, 2012.
 * A Sketch of Proto-Indo-Anatolian Phonology. Florence, SC USA, 2024.

with John C. Kerns:
 * The Nostratic Macrofamily: A Study in Distant Linguistic Relationship.  Berlin, New York, NY, and Amsterdam:  Mouton de Gruyter, 1994.

with Arnaud Fournet:
 * The Indo-European Elements in Hurrian. La Garenne Colombes / Charleston, 2010.