ABSTRACT
Brian Houghton Hodgson was a champion and influential propagator of the Turanian theory. This theory was conceived by Friedrich Max Müller, the famous German Indologist who came to England in 1846, married an English woman and settled in Oxford. Although popular in the British Isles, the Turanian theory was not well-received elsewhere, and Müller himself abandoned the idea before his death in 1900. During Hodgson’s lifetime there were three competing theories about the genetic relationship of the TibetoBurman languages of Nepal and northeastern India, to which Hodgson devoted so many studies. These were the Tibeto-Burman, Turanian and Indo-Chinese theories, and all three terms are found in Hodgson’s linguistic essays. Familiarity with these three theories is crucial to an understanding of the conceptual framework within which Hodgson viewed language relationships and speculated about prehistory. Hodgson’s work on language and ethnology cannot be divorced from thinking about race and language in his time and, in particular, from the distinction between the two made by Müller.
