Korean and Dravidian: Lexical Evidence for an Old Theory Morgan E. Clippinger Since 1905 when, on the basis of syntactic and typological similarities, Homer Hulbert first suggested a genetic relationship between Korean and Dravidian, there has been no systematic attempt to examine his theory in light of the lexical evidence available. This paper presents over four hundred sets of Korean- Dravidian cognate pairs, including many basic vocabulary items, in an attempt to uncover links between the two language groups. The evidence suggests that at a very ancient period Dravidian and Korean probably shared a common heritage and that this heritage might have been reinforced much later by migrations to the Korean peninsula, perhaps in the later years of the first millennium b.c. Where the ancestors of the Korean people came from, how their prehis- toric culture developed, and what their linguistic and racial origins were are intriguing, but still largely unanswered, questions. The attention of the scholarly community generally has focused on north Asia as the area of origin. There is, of course, little doubt that throughout the ages there has been a powerful northern current in the cultural development on the Korean peninsula. It is not inconceivable, however, that more than one linguistic-cultural entity was involved in this development. Indeed, archae- ological evidence suggests that several distinct groups played a role in the development of Korea's neolithic and metal age cultures. The preponderance of scholarly opinion holds that Korean is an Altaic language, related to Turkish, Mongolian, and Tungus-Manchu. Although a considerable body of evidence supports this view, not all linguists accept it. Some scholars link Altaic to the Uralic language family (Finnish, Vogul, Permian, Cheremis, Hungarian, and so on), and hypoth- esize a Ural-Altaic language superstock that includes Korean. Korean