Austroasiatic Languages (redirected from Austro-Asiatic languages)

Austroasiatic languages

Superfamily of about 150 languages spoken by close to 90 million physically and culturally very diverse people in South and Southeast Asia. Today most scholars believe that it is subdivided into two families, Munda and Mon-Khmer. The present fragmented distribution of Austroasiatic languages is most likely the result of relatively recent incursions by Indo-Aryan, Sino-Tibetan, Tai, and Austronesian-speaking peoples. In prehistoric times Austroasiatic languages most likely extended over a much broader and more continuous area, including much of what is now southeastern China. Other than Vietnamese and Khmer, no Austroasiatic language is an official national language.

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Austroasiatic Languages 

a language family the major groups of which are the Mon-Khmer and Munda languages; the kinship between these groups—and hence the very existence of the family—cannot be considered to have been definitively established. The Mon-Khmer group includes the Khmer language in Cambodia, the Mon language in southern Burma, and the languages of several minor peoples living in Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand (Bahnar, Cham, Kui, So, and others); it is possible that the Vietnamese language and the closely related Muong dialects belong to the same group. Adjoining the Mon-Khmer group are the Khasi language of Assam (India) and the Palaung-Wa group, which includes the languages of Palaung, Riang, and Wa in Burma, K’awa in Yunnan (China), Khmu in northern Laos, and others. The languages of the most ancient population of Malacca—Semang, Senoi, and Nicobarese (Nicobar Islands)—form separate groups. The Munda languages are spoken in India, chiefly in the states of Bihar and Orissa; the most important of them is Santali. The Tiam language, which had once been considered an Austroasiatic language, actually belongs to the Indonesian group of the Austronesian family. It is possible that the Miao-Yao languages in southern China are related to the Austroasiatic languages, and a distant relation between the Austroasiatic and the Austronesian languages is also postulated. The Mon-Khmer, Palaung-Wa, and Khasi languages are mainly isolating in structure, with monosyllabic roots and the use of prefixes and infixes in word formation; the Munda languages are agglutinative, and suffixation is present. The Munda languages are spoken by more than 5.5 million people; the remaining Austroasiatic languages, not including Vietnamese, by about 8 million.

REFERENCES

Schmidt, W. Die Mon-Khmer-Volker, ein Bindeglied zwischen Völkern Zentralasiens und Austronesiens. Braunschweig, 1906.
Sebeok, T. “An Examination of the Austroasiatic Language Family.” Language, 1942, vol. 18, pp. 206–17.
Pinnow, H.-J. Versuch einer historischen Lautlehre der Kharia-Sprache. Wiesbaden, 1959.
Studies in Comparative Austroasiatic Linguistics. The Hague, 1966.
Indo-Pacific Linguistic Studies, parts 1–2. Amsterdam, 1965.

S. E. IAKHONTOV