Japanese Turanism was based upon the same footing as its European counterparts. The Austrian German philologist Johann Anton Boller (1811–1869) was the first who systematically tried to prove the Ural-Altaic affiliation of the Japanese language. The Japanese linguist put forward a set of mainly typological characteristics linking Japanese to the Ural-Altaic family. The concept of Japanese as a Ural-Altaic language was quite widely accepted prior to the second world war. At present, Japanese is one of the only major language in the world whose genetic affiliation to other languages or language families has not been adequately proven.