The Eskimo-Uralic hypothesis proposes that the Uralic and Eskimo-Aleut language families belong to a single common macrofamily. It is the oldest proposal connecting the Eskaleut languages to any other language family, put forward soon after Europeans made contact with the Inuit; in 1818 the Danish linguist Rasmus Rask grouped Greenlandic and Finnish together on this basis. The hypothesis remains disputed today: some linguists, such as Ante Aikio, consider a relationship likely even without proof of specifics, while others, such as Stefan Georg, judge the evidence too thin to support even the possibility of contact-based borrowing between the two families.
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