| Austro-Asiatic | |
|---|---|
| Mon–Khmer | |
| Geographic distribution: |
South and Southeast Asia |
| Linguistic classification: | One of the world's major language families |
| Proto-language: | Proto-Mon–Khmer |
| Subdivisions: | |
| ISO 639-5: | aav |
Austro-Asiatic languages
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The Austro-Asiatic (Austroasiatic) languages, in recent classifications synonymous with Mon–Khmer, are a large language family of Southeast Asia, also scattered throughout India and Bangladesh. The name Austro-Asiatic comes from the Latin words for "south" and "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. Several recent classifications have abandoned Mon–Khmer as a valid node, or made it synonymous with the larger family (Diffloth 2005, Sidwell 2009).
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, Tai–Kadai, Dravidian, Austronesian, and Sino-Tibetan languages, are the result of later migrations of people.
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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.
Much work has been done on the reconstruction of Proto-Mon–Khmer in Harry L. Shorto's Mon–Khmer Comparative Dictionary. However, very little work has been done on Proto-Austro-Asiatic itself, since the Munda languages are not well documented. If Mon–Khmer is not a valid taxon, as some recent classifications would have it, then Proto-Mon–Khmer becomes synonymous with Proto-Austro-Asiatic.
Sidwell (2005) reconstructs the consonant inventory of Proto-Mon–Khmer as follows:
| *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 *ʄ. *ʄ is better preserved in the Katuic languages, which Sidwell has specialized in. Sidwell (2007, 2009) suggests that the likely homeland of Austro-Asiatic/Mon–Khmer is near central Vietnam, and that the family is not as old as frequently assumed.
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.
Sidwell (2009a), in a lexicostatistical comparison of 36 languages which are well-known enough to exclude loan words, finds little evidence for internal branching, though he did find an area of increased contact between the Bahnaric and Katuic languages, such that languages of all branches apart from the geographically distant Munda and Nicobarese show greater similarity to Bahnaric and Katuic the closer they are to those branches, without any noticeable innovations common to Bahnaric and Katuic. He therefore takes the conservative view that the thirteen branches of Austro-Asiatic should be treated as equidistant on current evidence.
| Austro-Asiatic = Mon–Khmer |
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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:
| Austro- Asiatic |
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Or in more detail,
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.[2] The route map of the people with haplogroup O2b, speaking this language can be seen in this link.[1]
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. Indeed, when Sidwell (2009a) replicated Peiros's study with languages known well enough to account for loans, he did not find the internal (branching) structure below.
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.