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Korean and Indonesian (Austronesian) words. Could Korean, its dialects in particular, have Austronesian influences? This idea came to mind because the word for stingray 가오리 has the dialect 가파리 and stingray in Indonesian is pari. Also, 하루 (day, one day) and 하루하루 (day by day) have the dialects 하리 and 하리하리 while ...
The Austroasiatic languages are a family of languages. They are spoken in Southeast Asia. There are 157 languages, with about 117 million speakers. The biggest group of speakers speak Khmer language or Vietnamese. These are also official languages in the territories where these are spoken.
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- Overview
- Classification of the Austroasiatic languages
- Phonological characteristics
Austroasiatic languages, 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 Muṇḍā language such as Muṇḍārī of India; linguistic comparisons, however, confirm the underlying unity of the family. The date of separation of the two main Austroasiatic subfamilies—Muṇḍā and Mon-Khmer—has 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.
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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 Muṇḍā 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 Muṇḍā and Vietnamese, the works of the German linguist Heinz-Jürgen Pinnow on Khaṛiā and of the French linguist André Haudricourt on Vietnamese tones have shown that both language groups are Austroasiatic.
The work of classifying and comparing the Austroasiatic languages is still in the initial stages. In the past, classification was done mainly according to geographic location. For instance, Khmer, Pear, and Stieng, all spoken on Cambodian territory, were all lumped together, although they actually belong to three different branches of the Mon-Khmer subfamily.
Khmer and Vietnamese are the most important of the Austroasiatic languages in terms of numbers of speakers. They are also the only national languages—Khmer of Cambodia, Vietnamese of Vietnam—of the Austroasiatic stock. Each is regularly taught in schools and is used in mass media and on official occasions. Speakers of most other Austroasiatic languages are under strong social and political pressure to become bilingual in the official languages of the nation in which they live. Most groups are too small or too scattered to win recognition, and for many the only chance of cultural survival lies in retreating to a mountain or jungle fastness, a strategy that reflects long-standing Austroasiatic tradition.
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The sound systems of Austroasiatic languages are fairly similar to each other, but Vietnamese and the Muṇḍā languages, under the influence of Chinese and Indian languages respectively, have diverged considerably from the original type. The usual Austroasiatic word structure consists of a major syllable sometimes preceded by one or more minor syllab...
Aug 19, 2014 · Populations speaking Austronesian languages are numerous and widespread, but their history remains controversial. Here, the authors analyse genetic data from Southeast Asia and show that all ...
- Mark Lipson, Po-Ru Loh, Nick Patterson, Priya Moorjani, Ying-Chin Ko, Mark Stoneking, Bonnie Berger,...
- 2014
Peter Bellwood , James J. Fox and Darrell Tryon. The Austronesian languages form a single and relatively close-knit family, similar in its degree of internal diversity and time depth to other major language families such as Austroasiatic, Uto-Aztecan and Indo-European. Prior to AD 1500 the Austronesian languages belonged to the most widespread ...
Austronesian languages - Classification, Prehistory, Diversity: Given the size of the Austronesian family, the subgrouping of the languages is a matter of some importance, bearing on, among other things, the determination of the Austronesian homeland. Until the 1930s the branches of Austronesian were customarily identified with purely geographic labels: Indonesian, Melanesian, Micronesian, and ...
belonging or relating to a large family of languages spoken in many different islands and countries in southeast Asia, that includes Malay, Indonesian, Javanese, and Tagalog: There are more than 1,000 Austronesian languages, scattered across half the globe. Fijian belongs to the Austronesian family of languages.
