AUSTROASIATIC LANGUAGES

Distribution of the Austroasiatic languages. also spelled Austro-Asiatic, stock of some 150 languages spoken by more than 65 million people scattered throughout Southeast Asia and eastern India. Most of these languages have numerous dialects. Khmer, Mon, and Vietnamese are culturally the most important and have the longest recorded history. The rest are languages of nonurban minority groups written, if at all, only recently. The stock 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; linguistic comparisons, however, confirm the underlying unity of the family. The date of separation of the two main Austroasiatic subfamiliesMunda and Mon-Khmerhas never been estimated and must be placed well back in prehistory. Within the Mon-Khmer subfamily itself, 12 main branches are distinguished; glottochronological estimates of the time during which specific languages have evolved separately from a common source indicate that these 12 branches all separated about 3,000 to 4,000 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. In 1906 Wilhelm Schmidt, a German anthropologist, classified Austroasiatic together with the Austronesian family (formerly called Malayo-Polynesian) to form a larger family called Austric. Paul K. Benedict, an American scholar, extended the Austric theory to include the Tai-Kadai family of Southeast Asia and the Miao-Yao (Hmong-Mien) family of China, together forming an Austro-Tai superfamily. Regarding subclassification within Austroasiatic, there have been several controversies. Schmidt, who first attempted a systematic comparison, included in Austroasiatic a mixed group of languages containing Malay borrowings and did not consider Vietnamese to be a member of the family. On the other hand, some of his critics contested the membership of the Munda group of eastern India. The mixed group, called Chamic, is now considered to be Austronesian. It includes Cham, Jarai, Rade (Rhade), Chru, Roglai, and Haroi and represents an ancient migration of Indonesian peoples into southern Indochina. As for Munda and Vietnamese, the works of the German linguist Heinz-Jrgen Pinnow on Kharia and of the French linguist Andr Haudricourt on Vietnamese tones have shown that both language groups are Austroasiatic. also spelled Austro-asiatic, a stock of some 150 languages spoken in Southeast Asia and eastern India. Vietnamese, Khmer, and Mon are culturally the most important of these and have the longest recorded history. Khmer is spoken primarily in Cambodia, Mon in Thailand and Myanmar (Burma). Vietnamese and Khmer, with the largest number of speakers, are the national languages, respectively, of Vietnam and Cambodia. The two main subdivisions of the Austroasiatic family are Munda, spoken in eastern India; and Mon-Khmer, spoken in Southeast Asia. The Nicobarese languages, spoken in the Nicobar Islands of the Andaman Sea, were previously thought to form a separate, third family of Austroasiatic, but more recent information suggests that they constitute a branch of Mon-Khmer. The Austroasiatic languages show great diversity. The Mon-Khmer family has 12 branches, and Munda has two subfamilies. Yet despite this variety, the underlying unity of the Austroasiatic languages is well established through modern scholarship. It is difficult to estimate the date at which the two families separated from the protolanguage. Statistical measurement techniques of glottochronology suggest that the division of Mon-Khmer into its 12 branches took place 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. Many attempts have been made to relate Austroasiatic to other language families. Wilhelm Schmidt in 1906 was the first to propose an Austric superfamily, comprising Austroasiatic and Austronesian. Because such a theory reaches so far back into prehistory, its validity is difficult to demonstrate. The subclassification of Austroasiatic has also been much discussed. Schmidt did not include Vietnamese in this family; others did not accept the Munda group. But more recent studies have shown that both are indeed members. The numerous Austroasiatic languages were once grouped and classified by geographic distribution alone; this revealed little as to their genetic relationships. Current work in classification is based on the historico-comparative method. Many of the less widely spoken languages have never been written; others have been recorded only in the last few decades of the 20th century. Letter shapes and writing principles for Mon and Khmer were borrowed from Indian alphabets. These were modified by each language to serve its special needs. The earliest inscriptions are from the early 7th century (Old Khmer and Old Mon). Several hundred monumental inscriptions in the Old Khmer language have been found in Cambodia and parts of Thailand and Vietnam. The Khmer writing system was later borrowed by the Thai, and the Mon system by the Burmese, for writing their respective languages. Vietnamese was first written using modified Chinese characters. In the 1650s, Portuguese missionaries created a Roman-like alphabet to write Vietnamese, and in 1910 this alphabet was made compulsory by the French administration. It is now known as quoc-ngu (national language) and is used throughout Vietnam. Mundari and Vietnamese, strongly influenced by Indian languages and Chinese, respectively, have acquired features that make them very different from the other Austroasiatic languages. They are therefore to be excluded from generalizations regarding the structure of Austroasiatic. The sound systems of Austroasiatic languages are unusual in containing large major vowel inventories: 3035 different vowels may be found in a language. These vowels may have distinctive length; that is, a normal vowel and a shorter vowel of the same quality will contrast. Also typical of these languages is a contrast between two sets of vowels that differ in voice quality, or register. A vowel may be spoken in a creaky register, a breathy register, or a normal voice. Some languages have a series of aspirated consonants. Mon-Khmer has implosives, sounds made by drawing in air and creating a suction. Nasals and liquids preceded by glottal stops are also found. The Austroasiatic languages are abundant in prefixes and infixes; suffixes are absent, except in Nicobarese. The same prefix may have a variety of functions. Austroasiatic languages also have a special word class called expressives. These are sentence adverbials describing sensory impressions and emotions, often with a symbolism reminiscent of synesthesia (i.e., the perception by one sense of a stimulus to another). Subtle wordplay lends further variety to this impressionistic language use. Syntactic characteristics include the lack of the copula be and the common use of ergative constructions (where the agent of the action is not expressed as the subject). There are also sentence-final particles indicating degree of respect or familiarity or of the speaker's opinion, expectations, or intentions. The vocabulary of each language reflects its history. Liberal borrowing characterizes all but the most isolated of the Austroasiatic languages. Vietnamese borrowed from Chinese, while Mon and Khmer borrowed from Sanskrit and Pali. Much of the original Austroasiatic vocabulary has been lost in these languages. It has been better preserved in languages of more isolated jungle and mountain regions, but these languages undergo change as well. Wordplay and expressive derivations extend the lexicon, and borrowing from nearby majority languages may take place. The vocabulary also continues to change in response to taboos. Nicknames or metaphors are used, for example, to refer to an animal whose true name may not be spoken. The new expression will eventually become stigmatized and a new name invented once again. This can cause closely related languages, like those of Nicobarese, to have widely different lexicons. Additional reading H.L. Shorto, Judith M. Jacob, and E.H.S. Simmonds (compilers), Bibliographies of Mon-Khmer and Tai Linguistics (1963), is an unannotated bibliography of linguistic books and articles from 1790 to 1960 that does not include the Munda subfamily or the Viet-Muong branch but incorporates the (Austronesian) Cham languages into Mon-Khmer. Two works by W. Schmidt, Grundzge einer Lautlehre der Mon-Khmer-Sprachen (1906), and Die Mon-Khmer-Vlker: ein Bindeglied zwischen Vlkern Zentralasiens und Austronesiens (1906), also available in a French translation, Les Peuples Mon-Khmer: trait-d'union entre les peuples de l'Asie Centrale et de l'Austronsie, Bulletin de l'cole franaise d'Extrme-Orient, 7:213263 and 8:135 (190708), for the first time support the Austroasiatic hypothesis with lexical, phonological, and morphological evidence; they remain the basic work of Austroasiatic studies. Walter William Skeat and Charles Otto Blagden, Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula, 2 vol. (1906, reissued 1966), includes a very large but unanalyzed comparative vocabulary. Heinz-Jrgen Pinnow, Versuch einer historischen Lautlehre der Kharia-Sprache (1959), an ambitious project with somewhat uncertain results, contains an analysis and systematic comparison of the phonologies of Munda languages and establishes connections with the rest of the Austroasiatic group. Mon-Khmer Studies (irregular) collects short technical articles mostly on the Montagnard languages of southern Vietnam, with topics varying from basic vocabulary to phonology, morphology, syntax, folk taxonomies, and oral literature. Grard Diffloth