Although agglutination is characteristic of certain language families, this does not mean that when several languages in a certain geographic area are all agglutinative they are necessarily related phylogenetically. In the past, this assumption led linguists to propose the so-called Ural–Altaic language family, which included (in the largest scope ever proposed) the Uralic and Turkic languages, as well as Mongolian, Korean, Tamil and Japanese. Contemporary linguistics views this proposal as controversial.[1]