Development Team Principal Investigator: Prof. Pramod Pandey Centre for Linguistics / SLL&CS Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi Email: [email protected] Paper Coordinator: Prof. K. S. Nagaraja Department of Linguistics, Deccan College Post-Graduate Research Institute, Pune- 411006, [email protected] Content Writer: Prof. K. S. Nagaraja Prof H. S. Ananthanarayana Content Reviewer: Retd Prof, Department of Linguistics Osmania University, Hyderabad 500007 Paper : Historical and Comparative Linguistics Linguistics Module : Austro-Asiatic family – I Description of Module Subject Name Linguistics Paper Name Historical and Comparative Linguistics Module Title Austro-Asiatic family – I Module ID Lings_P7_M25 Quadrant 1 E-Text Paper : Historical and Comparative Linguistics Linguistics Module : Austro-Asiatic family – I 21.AUSTRO - ASIATIC LANGUAGE FAMILY Austroasiatic language family is one of the five important language families found in the Indian sub- continent. The others are Indo-Aryan (of Indo-European), Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman and Andamanese. The term 'Austroasiatic’ comes from the Latin word for south and the Greek name of Asia, hence South Asia. The speakers of this family are scattered across south and South-east Asia, starting from central and eastern parts of India spreading to Bangladesh, Burma, southern China, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, South and North Vietnam and Malaysia. The languages of this family are generally grouped into three sub- branches, namely, Munda, Nicobarese and Mon-Khmer. However some scholars include Nicobarese within Mon-Khmer. While the Munda sub-branch is wholly located in the Indian-subcontinent, Mon- Khmer branch is found in most of South-east Asia starting with eastern India. The family comprises about 150 languages, most of them having numerous dialects and the speakers numbering more than 100 million. The Austroasiatic family is thought by some to be the first to have been spoken in ancient India. Austroasiatic languages include the Santal and Munda languages of eastern India, Nepal, and Bangladesh, and the Mon–Khmer languages spoken by the Khasi and Nicobarese in India and in Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and southern China. The Austroasiatic (AA) languages are thought to have been spoken throughout the Indian subcontinent by hunter- gatherers who were later assimilated first by the agriculturalist Dravidian settlers and later by the Indo-Aryan people arriving from the northwest of India. At one time, the AA domain probably extended unbroken from China to India to Malaysia, but intrusion by speakers of other languages split the AA community and divided it into enclaves. The Dravidians and Indo-Aryans entered India and certainly overran much of the Munda territory, doubtlessly reducing the AA population and certainly leaving the Munda languages scattered in small groups. The Tibeto-Burmans and Tais invaded Indo-China and split the AA domain in two. The Chams and Malays invaded Vietnam and Malaysia, respectively. The Chinese occupied northern Vietnam for nearly a millennium, and an Indian aristocracy apparently ruled parts of modern Cambodia and Thailand for some time. As a result of such incursions, few nation states ever developed in the AA domain, the Khmer, Mon, and Vietnamese empires being the exceptions, and most of the AA speakers have lived and still live in small tribal groups. All of these events had an impact on the AA languages, and for that reason, these languages exhibit an uncommon diversity that makes tracing their diachronic development extremely difficult. The Munda family has been influenced by a synthesizing, non-tonal Indian Sprachbund, the Mon-Khmer by an isolating, tonal Sinitic Sprachbund. In short, the two AA subfamilies have been pulled apart and consequently have evolved in different directions, which makes reconstructing their original phonology Paper : Historical and Comparative Linguistics Linguistics Module : Austro-Asiatic family – I and grammar a real challenge for historical linguists. Due to such difficulties and the inaccessibility of many of the tribal groups, AA studies have not proceeded apace with those of neighbouring language families. Comparatively speaking, little historical work has been done, and the proto-language of the family, the subfamilies, and most of the branches remain to be reconstructed. The speakers of Munda-sub-branch are considered to be one of the oldest groups living in this subcontinent. Though there are no literary texts in any of these languages as no language?incomplete. (At one time, the AA domain probably extended unbroken from China to India to Malaysia, but invasion by speakers of other languages split the AA community and divided it into enclaves. The Dravidians and Indo-Aryans entered India and certainly? overran much of the Munda territory, doubtlessly reducing the AA population and certainly leaving the Munda languages scattered in small groups. The Tibeto-Burmans and Tais invaded Indo-China and split the AA domain in two. The Chams and Malays invaded Vietnam and Malaysia, respectively. The Chinese occupied northern Vietnam for nearly a millennium, and an Indian aristocracy apparently ruled parts of modern Cambodia and Thailand for some time. As a result of such incursions, few nation states ever developed in the AA domain, the Khmer, Mon, and Vietnamese empires being the exceptions, and most of the AA speakers have lived and still live in small tribal groups. The date and place of the origin of Austroasiatic is still unknown. The place was probably southern or southeastern China; the date was at least circa 2000-2500 B.C. and possibly much earlier. From that location, AA speakers moved south into the Indo-China peninsula and west into India. Their southern- most expansion was the Nicobar Islands and the southern tip of Malaysia; some may have penetrated Sumatra and other islands, but this is uncertain. Their western-most expansion is unknown, but some argue that it extended into modern Pakistan. Austroasiatic languages have a disjunct distribution across India, Bangladesh and Southeast Asia, separated by regions where other languages are spoken. They appear to be the autochthonous languages of Southeast Asia, with the neighboring Indic, Tai, Dravidian, Austronesian, and Tibeto- Burman languages being the result of later migrations (Sidwell& Blench, 2011).(Once it is autochthonous, once it arrived here from southeastern China. Which do you prefer?) Genetic studies of representatives from all branches of Austroasiatic indicate the ancestors of Austroasiatic speakers originated in present-day India and migrated into Southeast Asia from the Brahmaputra River Valley. The Austroasiatic language family is considered to be one of the oldest families of this region. Khmer, Mon and Vietnamese are culturally the most important and have the longest recorded history. Among these languages, (only Vietnamese, Khmer, and Mon have a long recorded history), and only Vietnamese and Khmer have official status (in Vietnam and Cambodia, respectively). The rest of the languages are spoken by non-urban minority groups; written, if at all, only recently. The family is of great importance as a linguistic substratum for all Southeast Asian languages. Superficially, there seems to be little in common between a monosyllabic tone language such as Vietnamese and a polysyllabic toneless Munda language such as Mundari of India; every recent study, however, confirms the underlying unity of the family. The date of separation of the three main Austroasiatic subfamilies - Munda, Nicobarese and Mon-Khmer – has never been estimated and must be placed well back in prehistory. Within the MK subfamily itself, 12 main branches are distinguished; Paper : Historical and Comparative Linguistics Linguistics Module : Austro-Asiatic family – I glottochronological estimates of the time during which specific languages have evolved separately from a common source indicate that these 12 branches all separated about 3000 to 4000 years ago. Relationships with other language families have been proposed, but, because of the long durations involved and the scarcity of reliable data, it is very difficult to present a solid demonstration of their validity. Though there are no literary texts in any of the Munda languages (as no language of the group was put to writing at any time of the history;) oblique references to Munda languages can be found in the literary texts of Indo-Aryan languages. In ancient literature some of these people were referred to as Nishada, Kolla, Bhilla, Pulinda ~ Pulindra, Kiraata, Sabara, etc. For instance, the Kiraata people of the Vedic texts may be the present Kharia people; Šabara people mentioned in Aitareya Brahmana and other early Sanskrit texts may be the present Soara people. The Kharia and Juang consider themselves to be sections of the Šabara people of olden times. The Juang women used leaves as their garments until recently, for which reason they are also known as Patua. In this country most of these people are found in the midst of forests and mountains of central and eastern India and in Nicobar group of Islands. Only during the last two centuries a better understanding of these people has become possible. In the early 19th century, a beginning was made with the attempts of Hodgson and Max Müller. Hodgson (1848, 1856) hinted that there were actually three groups of languages in India, the Himalayan, Indo-Aryan and Tamulian. The last one included both the Dravidian and the Kol groups of languages. In 1854 Max Müller separated the Dravidian from Kol/Austric and referred to these people as ‘Munda’ for the first time. In due course of time this term was accepted to refer to these people as a group as such. 1. Sub-classification: Regarding sub-classification within AA, there have been several controversies. Schmidt, who first attempted a systematic comparison, included in AA a “mixed group” of languages containing “Malay” borrowings and did not consider Vietnamese to be a member of the family. As for Munda and Vietnamese, the recent works of the German linguist Heinz-Jürgen Pinnow on Kharia and of the French linguist Andre Haudricourt on Vietnamese tones have shown that both language groups are AA.