The Austroasiatic Languages: a Typological Overview

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The Austroasiatic Languages: a Typological Overview chapter 2 The Austroasiatic Languages: A Typological Overview Mathias Jenny, Tobias Weber and Rachel Weymuth The Austroasiatic (AA) languages are geographically widespread, occurring in mostly discontinuous pockets of speech communities. The vast majority of AA languages have no official status; the only exceptions are Vietnamese and Khmer, which are the national languages of Vietnam and Cambodia, respec- tively, and Khasi, which has official status in the Indian state of Meghalaya, where it is effectively used as a majority language by one million plus speak- ers for many purposes. Serving as vernaculars of non-majority populations in most countries where they are spoken, the AA languages are exposed to exter- nal influence to varying degrees. This has led to the great diversity of structures found in the AA languages today, which is partly due to different degrees of retention of inherited features, partly to language change, mostly under the influence of dominant neighboring languages. As the overall structure of the proto-language is not well known apart from various morphological processes found in branches separated by hundreds or thousands of kilometers for many centuries, it is often difficult to make conclusive statements concerning the origin of specific structural features in individual languages. While the verb final constituent order in the Munda languages can be attributed to areal South Asian influence with some confidence, we cannot readily explain the presence of verb initial structures found in Nicobarese as well as some Khasian and Palaungic languages. Typologically, the AA languages can be superficially grouped into three dis- tinct subgroups which belong to three geographic regions of the AA speaking area. The Munda languages in central and eastern India are consistently verb- final agglutinating languages, with a large number of affixes expressing deriva- tional processes as well as case relations with nominals, and tense-aspect and person with verbs. The Nicobarese languages, spoken on the Nicobar islands in the Andaman Sea, are generally verb-initial and exhibit complex morpho- logical processes, including prefixes, infixes, and suffixes. The rest of the fam- ily, mostly spoken in Mainland Southeast Asia, is generally verb-medial, and apart from traces of inherited derivational morphology, isolating. A large num- ber of other features and isoglosses cut across the boundaries of these three © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004�8357�_003 14 Jenny, weber and weymuth groups, though. In addition, at least in the case of the Munda languages, the preset typological profile is at least partly due to the areal influence of South Asian languages. No such influence can be conclusively claimed in the case of Nicobarese languages, but in both Munda and Nicobarese there are traces of different word orders, which may be seen as older. The present typological appearance is therefore not enough for an internal classification of the AA lan- guages into three groups, but may rather be the (recent) outcome of events in the history of these languages. This chapter brings together data from a large number of AA languages cov- ering all known or described branches. The examples are mostly taken from the grammar sketches by various authors in this publication, complemented with data from other published sources. No complete typological profile of the AA family is attempted here, as the state of AA studies is still far from a point where this undertaking would be possible. Our aim is rather to give a short overview of structures found in the different AA languages, illustrating the diversity of the family. Extensive text corpora on which a more in-depth study of morphosyntactic structures would have to based are to the present day non- existent in next to all AA languages. Also comprehensive descriptive grammars are, with a few exceptions, not available for most AA languages, and the avail- able material covers only a small part of the whole family. We are therefore not yet in a position to synthesize a complete typological profile of AA, and must content ourselves with a descriptive presentation of the structures encoun- tered in the individual languages. 1 Phonetics and Phonology AA languages generally tend to reflect the typological phonological profile of the geographical areas in which they are spoken. Hence, Munda languages fol- low patterns typical of South Asia, while the AA languages spoken in Mainland Southeast Asia follow patterns typical of that area. However, AA languages also exhibit features that are frequent in the family but not typical of the languages of other families of the respective areas. Besides the characteristic features of AA, individual languages in some cases considerably differ from each other and exhibit features that are rare—from an areal or even from a worldwide perspective. The branches of AA show differing degrees of internal phonological diver- sity. Fairly diverse branches are Bahnaric, Palaungic, Aslian, and Vietic (cf. Diffloth 1980: 3). The reasons for that might be partly the number of languages that belong to each branch (Bahnaric being the largest) and partly the areal profile of the languages (small languages spoken in remote areas and/or in .
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