Racial affinity vs linguistic affinity

Most people including many anthropologists and linguists have assumed linkages between races on the basis of common linguistics. It's not only that, but racial similarities between certain ethnic groups usually goes ignored because the languages they speak are much more distantly related or in some cases not related at all. While such assumptions are understandable, they are not always correct.

In this post examples of common racial affinity can be compared to common linguistic affinity.
Let me compare two separate races which are unrelated but at the same time speak languages that are closely related to one another. Below is a picture of a Turkish person from Anatolia:


People from Turkey speak Turkish which belongs to the Western Oghuz Turkic subfamily of languages.
Compare this Turkish man to the Uzbek individual below and notice the vast racial difference between the two:


While racially they may seem very distinct (and perhaps culturally too), the languages they speak are still in fairly close proximity.
Though a separate language of it's own from Turkish, the Uzbek language is still closely related to Turkish, both belonging to the Turkic family of languages inside the larger Altaic language family. The chart below maps out the Altaic family, though not very accurately: (click on image to enlarge)


After looking at the chart, compare the Uzbek man pictured above to this Mongolian man pictured below:

His closer resemblance to the Mongolian points to a closer racial affinity between Central Asian Turkic speaking peoples and Mongolians. This is despite Central Asian Turks speaking languages/dialects very similar to that of people from Turkey and Azerbaijan. Most people from Turkey and Azerbaijan look nothing like Central Asian Turks in terms of skull structure and are racially unrelated to them, though there is some Central Asian genetic influence in the Turkish and Azerbaijani populations.

While comparing the racial similarity between the Uzbek to the Mongolian, the vast distinct relationships between their languages should be observed.
Mongolian belongs to the Mongolic branch of Altaic languages as the chart above shows. Neither Mongolian or any other Mongolic languages have common intelligibility with the Turkic language aside from perhaps common cognates.

This is an example of races/ethnic groups having common racial affinity (Central Asian Turks to Mongolians) while the languages they speak are very distant from their close racial relatives languages to those languages of peoples who have racially very little or nothing in common with them (Turks from Central Asia to Turkic speaking peoples from Azerbaijan and Turkey).

There are many reasons for such cases to occur. It really depends on the circumstances of each case. At many times language shift occurs by one ethnic group to a language related to their own or at many times unrelated to their own. When it goes on for generations, the ethnic group eventually evolves the language(s) it picked up into a dialect of it's on and then later on into a completely separate language.

Such happened in the case for Turkey and Azerbaijan when Oghuz Turkic armies came from Central Asia and colonized Anatolia and the Caucasus. They also left genetic imprints, but not significant enough to be noticed by general observations. Very few people from Turkey and Azerbaijan show Turko-Mongol ancestry, but it doesn't mean it's not there.

The infamous Turkish singer Mustapha Yildizdogan is perhaps the best example of Oghuz genetic influence in Turkey.
A good way to catch Oghuz Turkic imprints in the two countries is to find distributions of Haplogroup Q on their maps.

Another example of this is comparisons between Indo-European speaking populations of Southern Central Asia and the Middle East to East European populations.
The closest racial relatives of Eastern European peoples are actually situated in South Central Asia and the Middle East, not in Western Europe. Strong evidence in their common origins are found in their related languages as well as some similar features, but most strongly in the common Haplogroup R1A that they belong to.

Western Europeans also carry this haplogroup, but I believe it was mainly due to mixing with Eastern Europeans.
While many Indo-European (IE) speaking peoples of Asia are related to Eastern Europeans going back thousands of years, the languages they speak are very distantly related to the languages of Eastern Europeans. Most Eastern Europeans save for Romanians speak Balto-Slavic languages, while most IE speakers in Southern Central Asia and the Middle East speak Indo-Iranic languages.

The Indo-Iranic language family is divided into Iranic languages, Dardic languages, Indo-Aryan languages and a few individual languages of the family belonging to no subbranch said to be spoken in the remote mountain regions of Northern Pakistan and Eastern Afghanistan.
Click here to view a full chart of the Indo-Iranic language family.

At the same time, there are plenty of peoples in the region who speak IE languages (mostly Indo-Iranic) but are not of IE descent and of different origins.
However, these non-IE origin peoples of Southern and Central Asia speak languages closely related to those who are of IE descent. I will cover examples of these, but first I'd like to compare between IE peoples in Asia to their distant Eastern European relatives.

Two Pakhtun (also spelled Pashtun) individuals from Northern Pakistan:



The majority of Pakhtuns do not display similar characteristics to East Europeans but a large and significant minority of them do.
Compare the faces of those Pakhtuns to that of this Belorussian man:


The Kalash of the Chitral Valley in Northern Pakistan can also be comparable to Slavs since they absorbed the least non-IE genes and lived mostly in isolation:


Here is a picture of two Tajik girls from the northernmost of Afghanistan:


The strong resemblance between these various Indo-Iranic peoples towards Eastern Europeans is not coincidental. These people are distantly related to Eastern Europeans. At the same time, while the languages spoken by these people are related to the Balto-Slavic languages, it is a very distant relationship. Even amongst each other as well as themselves, the Baltic and Slavic languages are barely understandable towards one another's speakers.

The same can be said for Indo-Aryan, Dardic, Iranic and other languages within the Indo-Iranic family. Some of these languages such as Farsi and Bengali have even lost the gender distinction trait very commonly found in Indo-European.

Despite the distant linguistic relationship between these IE peoples in Europe and Asia, they are genetically closer to each other than they are to other IE speaking people in Europe as well as IE speakers Asia who are not of IE descent.
Examples of IE speakers in Asia of non-Indo-European descent are the Sinhalese people or the Bengali people. Though some people in these ethnic groups are of original Indo-Aryan stock, the vast majority of these populations are Indo-Aryan mostly by language. This is due to Sanskrit speakers spreading throughout the subcontinent and few of their remaining descendants can be found amongst these ethnic groups.

Typical Sinhalese people:


This is another of many examples where we have distantly related peoples and languages but sometimes at closer linguistic affinity with non-related races.

Another and more obvious example is the Finnish peoples genetic relationship to other Germanic populations but their linguistic affinity with other Uralic populations, most of whom are of non-Germanic and non-IE descent.

This Finnish girl looks mostly indistinguishable from an average Scandinavian or any Northern European for that matter:


The language she speaks (Finnish) is unrelated to the Germanic languages of Scandinavia or any Indo-European language.
Finnish is a Uralic language that originates in the Ural mountain region in Siberia alongside other Uralic languages, most of which has speakers racially/genetically unrelated to the majority of Finns.

The Finnish girl has no linguistic affinity to most other Europeans, unlike the two Sinhalese people pictured above who speak, Sinhalese, an Indo-Aryan language which belongs to the same Indo-European family as most of Europe's languages.
But at the same time those Sinhalese people have no affinity towards Europeans racially, whereas the Finnish girl is more or less the exact same race as other northern and western Europeans.

There are some Finns who display higher Uralic and Siberian genetic influence (higher cheek bones, wider eyes etc.), however the majority of them don't.
Below are pictures of Komi people. They are a Uralic people, mainly of non-European stock, but speak a language closely related to Finnish:

Here is another group of Komis. These ones show more Europid influence in them:


The Komis live in the Russian Federation. It is important to note that many peoples of the Russian Federation including Slavic, Finnic and Turkic peoples have large inputs of Scandinavian admixture in their gene pools.
The northwestern parts of the modern Russian Federation was home to various Scandinavian peoples before they became assimilated mostly by migrating Slavs as well as Turkic tribes.

Today Scandinavian features are most commonly found in these areas. The examples provided above are few of many cases when comparing racial and linguistic affinity between various peoples across the world. Any questions or misunderstanding should be posted in the comments section and I will try to answer them as best as I can or clear misconceptions.