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Altaic is a disputed language family that is generally held by its proponents to include the Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, and Japonic language families and the Korean language. These languages are spoken in a wide arc stretching from northeast Asia through Central Asia to Anatolia and eastern Europe.

The group is named after the Altai Mountains, a mountain range in Central Asia. These language families share numerous characteristics. The debate is over the origin of their similarities. One camp, often called the "Altaicists", views these similarities as arising from common descent from a Proto-Altaic language spoken several thousand years ago.

The other camp, often called the "anti-Altaicists", views these similarities as arising from areal interaction between the language groups concerned. Some linguists believe the case for either interpretation is about equally strong.

Another view accepts Altaic as a valid family but includes in it only Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic. This view was widespread prior to the 1960s, but has almost no supporters among specialists today.

The expanded grouping, including Korean and Japanese, came to be known as "Macro-Altaic", leading to the designation by back-formation of the smaller grouping as "Micro-Altaic". Most proponents of Altaic continue to support the inclusion of Korean and Japanese.

Micro-Altaic would include about 66 living languages, to which Macro-Altaic would add Korean, Japanese, and the Ryukyuan languages for a total of about 74. Micro-Altaic would have a total of about 348 million speakers today, Macro-Altaic about 558 million.