The authors attempt to explain Turko-Mongolian shared words through loanwords from the 13th century as well as Turkic and Mongolic languages having a common ancestor.

[2]: 26–27 The dictionary views Altaic as extending to the 5th millennium B.C., and consisting of 3 groups - Turko-Mongolic, Mongol-Tungusic, and Korean-Japanese, using lexostatistical evidence to justify it.

It has been criticized for missing small details and requirements in its comparisons, and that the dictionary would have to need more evaluation by Stefan Georg,[4] which Starostin responded to.

[5] Roy Andrew Miller, an Altaicist, praised it, saying that the "publication can only be welcomed, not only by comparative and historical linguists but by everyone interested in the early history and cultures of Greater Asia.

The thousands of pages in these three volumes make available important scholarship by our Russian colleagues, much of which until recently lurked in the decent obscurity of Soviet books and periodicals always difficult if not impossible to obtain in the West..."[6]