Macro-Siouan hypothesis

Macro-Siouan hypothesis, a proposal, now mostly abandoned, of a distant family relationship (phylum, macro-family, or superstock) that would group together languages in North America of the Siouan, Iroquoian, and Caddoan language families and the language isolate Yuchi. Earlier versions of the hypothesis had linked only Siouan and Iroquoian, to which Caddoan and Yuchi were added later. The proposal is best known from the work of American linguist Wallace Chafe in the 1960s and ’70s. The...