The Austro-Asiatic languages are a large language family of Southeast Asia, also scattered throughout India and Bangladesh. The name comes from the Latin word for "south" and the Greek name of Asia, hence "South Asia". Among these languages, only Khmer, Vietnamese, and Mon have a long established recorded history, and only Vietnamese and Khmer have official status (in Vietnam and Cambodia, respectively). The rest of the languages are spoken by minority groups. Ethnologue identifies 168 Austro-Asiatic languages. These are traditionally divided into two families, Mon-Khmer and Munda. Two recent classifications have abandoned Mon-Khmer as a valid node, although this is tentative and not generally accepted.
Austro-Asiatic languages have a disjunct distribution across India, Bangladesh and Southeast Asia, separated by regions where other languages are spoken. It is widely believed that the Austro-Asiatic languages are the autochthonous languages of Southeast Asia and the eastern Indian subcontinent, and that the other languages of the region, including the Indo-European, Kradai, Dravidian, Austronesian, and Sino-Tibetan languages, are the result of later migrations of people.
Morphology
The Austro-Asiatic languages are well known for having a "sesqui-syllabic" pattern, with basic nouns and verbs consisting of a reduced minor syllable plus a full syllable. Many of them also have infixes.
Proto-language
Much work has been done on the reconstruction of Proto-Mon-Khmer in the Mon-Khmer Comparative Dictionary. However, very little work has been done on Proto-Austro-Asiatic itself, since the Munda languages are not well documented.
Sidwell (2005) reconstructs the consonant inventory of Proto-Mon Khmer as follows:
{| class="IPA wikitable"
|*p||*t||*c||*k||*ʔ
|-
|*b||*d||*ɟ||*ɡ||
|-
|*ɓ||*ɗ||*ʄ|| ||
|-
|*m||*n||*ɲ||*ŋ||
|-
|*w||*l, *r||*j|| ||
|-
| ||*s|| || ||*h
|}
This is identical to earlier reconstructions except for . is better preserved in the Katuic languages, which Sidwell specializes more in than the other branches of Austro-Asiatic.
Classification
Linguists traditionally recognize two primary divisions of Austro-Asiatic: the
Mon-Khmer languages of Southeast Asia,
Northeast India and the
Nicobar Islands, and the
Munda languages of
East and Central India and parts of Bangladesh. However, no evidence for this classification has ever been published.
Each of the families that is written in boldface type below is accepted as a valid clade. By contrast, the relationships between these families within Austro-Asiatic is debated. In addition to the traditional classification, two recent proposals are given, neither of which accept traditional "Mon-Khmer" as a valid unit. However, little of the data used for competing classifications has ever been published, and therefore cannot be evaluated by peer review.
Gérard Diffloth (2005)
Diffloth compares reconstructions of various clades, and attempts to classify them based on shared innovations, though like other classifications the evidence has not been published. As a schematic, we have:
|2=
}}
}}
|label2= Khasi- Khmuic
|2=
}}
}}
|label3= (Nuclear)
|3={{clade
|1={{clade
|1={{clade
|1=Vietic
|2=Katuic ?
::: Vietic: 10 languages of Vietnam and Laos, including the Vietnamese language, which has the most speakers of any Austro-Asiatic language. These are the only Austro-Asiatic languages to have highly developed tone systems.
::: Katuic: 19 languages of Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand.
::* Khmero-Bahnaric languages
:::* Bahnaric: 40 languages of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
:::*Khmeric languages
:::: The Khmer dialects of Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam.
:::: Pearic: 6 languages of Cambodia.
:* Nico-Monic languages (Southern Mon-Khmer)
::* Nicobarese languages: 6 languages of the Nicobar Islands, a territory of India.
::* Asli-Monic languages
::: Aslian: 19 languages of peninsular Malaysia and Thailand.
::: Monic: 2 languages, the Mon language of Burma and the Nyahkur language of Thailand.
This family tree is consistent with recent studies of migration of Y-Chromosomal haplogroup O2b-M95. However, the dates obtained from DNA studies are several times older than that given by linguists.. The route map of the people with haplogroup O2b, speaking this language can be seen in this link.
Ilia Peiros (2004)
Peiros is a
lexicostatistic classification, based on percentages of shared vocabulary. This means that a language may appear to be more distantly related than it actually is due to
language contact, so it is only a starting point for a proper genealogical classification.
Nicobarese
Munda-Khmer
*Munda
*Mon-Khmer
**Khasi
**Nuclear Mon-Khmer
***Mangic (Mang + Palyu) (perhaps in Northern MK)
***Vietic (perhaps in Northern MK)
***Northern Mon-Khmer
****Palaungic
****Khmuic
***Central Mon-Khmer
****Khmer dialects
****Pearic
****Asli-Bahnaric
*****Aslian
*****Mon-Bahnaric
******Monic
******Katu-Bahnaric
*******Katuic
*******Bahnaric
Diffloth (1974)
Diffloth's widely cited original classification, now abandoned by Diffloth himself, is used in
Encyclopædia Britannica and—except for the breakup of Southern Mon-Khmer—in
Ethnologue.
Munda
*North Munda
** Korku
**Kherwarian
*South Munda
**Kharia-Juang
**Koraput Munda
Mon-Khmer
*Eastern Mon-Khmer
**Khmer (Cambodian)
**Pearic
**Bahnaric
**Katuic
**Vietic (includes Vietnamese)
*Northern Mon-Khmer
**Khasi (Meghalaya, India)
**Palaungic
**Khmuic
*Southern Mon-Khmer
**Mon
**Aslian (Malaya)
**Nicobarese (Nicobar Islands)
Notes
See also
Proto-Mon-Khmer language
References
Adams, K. L. (1989). Systems of numeral classification in the Mon-Khmer, Nicobarese and Aslian subfamilies of Austroasiatic. Canberra, A.C.T., Australia: Dept. of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University. ISBN 0-85883-373-5
Byomkes Chakrabarti, A Comparative Study of Santali and Bengali, 1994
Filbeck, D. (1978). T'in: a historical study. Pacific linguistics, no. 49. Canberra: Dept. of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University. ISBN 0-85883-172-4
Hemeling, K. (1907). Die Nanking Kuanhua. (German language)
Peck, B. M., Comp. (1988). An Enumerative Bibliography of South Asian Language Dictionaries.
Peiros, Ilia. 1998. Comparative Linguistics in Southeast Asia. Pacific Linguistics Series C, No. 142. Canberra: Australian National University.
Shorto, Harry L. edited by Sidwell, Paul, Cooper, Doug and Bauer, Christian (2006). A Mon-Khmer comparative dictionary. Canberra: Australian National University. Pacific Linguistics. ISBN 0-85883-570-3
Shorto, H. L. Bibliographies of Mon-Khmer and Tai Linguistics. London oriental bibliographies, v. 2. London: Oxford University Press, 1963.
Sidwell, Paul (2005) "Proto-Katuic Phonology and the Sub-grouping of Mon-Khmer Languages". In Sidwell, ed., SEALSXV: papers from the 15th meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistic Society.
Zide, Norman H., and Milton E. Barker. (1966) Studies in Comparative Austroasiatic Linguistics, The Hague: Mouton (Indo-Iranian monographs, v. 5.).
External links
Comparative Austro-Asiatic Swadesh vocabulary lists (from Wiktionary's Swadesh list appendix)
The LINGUIST List MultiTree Project: Austro-Asiatic Family Trees
Mon-Khmer.com: Lectures by Paul Sidwell
Ethnologue classification
Mon-Khmer languages at SEAlang
Category:Agglutinative languages
