Munda languages

Munda
Mundaic
Geographic distribution	Indian subcontinent
Ethnicity	Munda peoples
Linguistic classification	Austroasiatic Munda
Proto-language	Proto-Munda
Subdivisions	North Munda Sora–Gorum Juang Kharia Gutob–Remo Gtaʼ
Language codes
ISO 639-2 / 5	mun
ISO 639-3	–
Glottolog	mund1335
Map of areas with significant concentration of Munda speakers

The Munda languages are a group of closely related languages spoken by about nine million people in India, Bangladesh and Nepal.^[1][2][3] Historically, they have been called the Kolarian languages.^[4] They constitute a branch of the Austroasiatic language family, which means they are more distantly related to languages such as the Mon and Khmer languages, to Vietnamese, as well as to minority languages in Thailand and Laos and the minority Mangic languages of South China.^[5] Bhumij, Ho, Mundari, and Santali are notable Munda languages.^[6][7][1]

The family is generally divided into two branches: North Munda, spoken in the Chota Nagpur Plateau of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Odisha and West Bengal, as well as in parts of Bangladesh and Nepal, and South Munda, spoken in central Odisha and along the border between Andhra Pradesh and Odisha.^[8][9][1]

North Munda, of which Santali is the most widely spoken and recognised as an official language in India, has twice as many speakers as South Munda. After Santali, the Mundari and Ho languages rank next in number of speakers, followed by Korku and Sora. The remaining Munda languages are spoken by small, isolated groups, and are poorly described.^[1]

Characteristics of the Munda languages include three grammatical numbers (singular, dual and plural), two genders (animate and inanimate), a distinction between inclusive and exclusive first person plural pronouns, the use of suffixes or auxiliaries to indicate tense,^[10] and partial, total, and complex reduplication, as well as switch-reference.^[11][10] The Munda languages are also polysynthetic and agglutinating.^[12][13] In Munda sound systems, consonant sequences are infrequent except in the middle of a word.

Many linguists suggest that the Proto-Munda language probably split from proto-Austroasiatic somewhere in Indochina.^{[citation needed]} Paul Sidwell (2018) suggests they arrived on the coast of modern-day Odisha about 4000–3500 years ago (c. 2000 – c. 1500 BCE) and spread after the Indo-Aryan migration to the region.^[14][15]

Rau and Sidwell (2019),^[16][17] along with Blench (2019),^[18] suggest that pre-Proto-Munda had arrived in the Mahanadi River Delta around 1,500 BCE from Southeast Asia via a maritime route, rather than overland. The Munda languages then subsequently spread up the Mahanadi watershed. 2021 studies suggest that Munda languages impacted Eastern Indo-Aryan languages.^[19][20]

Munda consists of five uncontroversial branches (Korku as an isolate, Remo, Savara, Kherwar, and Kharia-Juang). However, their interrelationship is debated.

The bipartite Diffloth (1974) classification is widely cited:

Diffloth (2005) retains Koraput (rejected by Anderson, below) but abandons South Munda and places Kharia–Juang with the northern languages:

Gregory Anderson's 1999 proposal is as follows.^[21]

However, in 2001, Anderson split Juang and Kharia apart from the Juang-Kharia branch and also excluded Gtaʔ from his former Gutob–Remo–Gtaʔ branch. Thus, his 2001 proposal includes 5 branches for South Munda.

Anderson (2001) follows Diffloth (1974) apart from rejecting the validity of Koraput. He proposes instead, on the basis of morphological comparisons, that Proto-South Munda split directly into Diffloth's three daughter groups, Kharia–Juang, Sora–Gorum (Savara), and Gutob–Remo–Gtaʼ (Remo).^[23]

His South Munda branch contains the following five branches, while the North Munda branch is the same as those of Diffloth (1974) and Anderson (1999).

Sora–Gorum   Juang ↔ Kharia ↔ Gutob–Remo ↔ Gtaʔ

• Note: "↔" = shares certain innovative isoglosses (structural, lexical). In Austronesian and Papuan linguistics, this has been called a "linkage" by Malcolm Ross.

Paul Sidwell (2015:197)^[24] considers Munda to consist of 6 coordinate branches, and does not accept South Munda as a unified subgroup.

The Munda languages share some unified characteristics that make them considerably standout from the rest of the Austroasiatic languages: Munda word order is SOV or APV, though SVO is numerous in Sora, an archaic Munda language; morphologically, the Munda languages are highly synthetic and agglutinating, while the non-Munda Austroasiatic are primarily analytic, isolating (Cambodian, Vietnamese) to inflectional (Khasian, Nicobarese). They use a great number of suffixes in nominal and verbal morphology, compared to few and sporadic in non-Munda Austroasiatic. However, most Munda suffixes are of native origin, have cognates with non-Munda Austroasiatic free morphemes, suggesting that these were proto-Munda innovations. Phonologically, the Munda languages are highly divergent, some are generally observed to be inconsistently trochaic and do stress in first syllable like Ho and Mundari, but other languages such as Santali, Korwa, Sora, Gorum, Juang, Remo and Gtaʔ exhibit strong iambic word patterns. Korku has two tones: an unmarked high and a marked low. Creaky voice is reported in Gorum.

The Munda languages also make themselves radically different from the mainstream Indian languages: Munda are head-marking, but Indo-European and Dravidian are dependent-marking. Munda verbs are much more synthetic than Indian, to the extreme that which is not found in any typical Indo-European and Dravidian languages. For example, a sentence in casual Kharia conversation can be squished into a single long word:

The Munda languages also make extensive uses of prefixes and infixes, in contrast to exclusively suffixing Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages. Causative infixes -pV- and -nV, agentive -m-, which are pan-Austroasiatic features, are very productive in Munda.

Predicates and auxiliary verb constructions are widespread among Munda languages. In South Asian areal context, the characteristics of Munda simplex and complex verbs do not resemble those of the mainstream Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages, but with Burushaki and Kiranti languages of the Sino-Tibetan languages in the Himalayas.

Kharia

Gtaʔ

Sora

Limbu (Kiranti, Sino-Tibetan)

Burushaski (isolate)

The Sora-Gorum-Juray languages have noun incorporation, with Sora being the most productive; Korku, Gutob, and the Kherwarian languages have lost the ability to form noun incorporation due to stronger influence from less-synthetic Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages, but still have the remnants. None of the Dravidian and Indo-European languages does have this property. Overall, degrees of complex morphology and polysynthesis in Munda can reach the highest level in Sora and Santali. Sino-Tibetan languages in the mountainous region around East Himalaya including the East Kiranti languages such as Limbu, Chintang, Kham, Galo display similar prominence patterns and extremely synthetic morphosyntactic structure with Austroasiatic Munda, and Burushaski. Researchers suggest that these similarities reflect a hypothetical areal morphological profile (sprachbund) that might have existed in Northeastern South Asia before Indo-Aryan-Dravidian linguistic profile spread into the area.^[25]

The proto-forms have been reconstructed by Sidwell & Rau (2015: 319, 340–363).^[26] Proto-Munda reconstruction has since been revised and improved by Rau (2019).^[27][28]

• Nihali language
• Munda peoples

• Diffloth, Gérard (1974). "Austro-Asiatic Languages". Encyclopædia Britannica. pp. 480–484.
• Diffloth, Gérard (2005). "The contribution of linguistic palaeontology to the homeland of Austro-Asiatic". In Sagart, Laurent; Blench, Roger; Sanchez-Mazas, Alicia (eds.). The Peopling of East Asia: Putting Together Archaeology, Linguistics and Genetics. RoutledgeCurzon. pp. 79–82.

• Anderson, Gregory D S (2007). The Munda verb: typological perspectives. Trends in linguistics. Vol. 174. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-018965-0.
• Anderson, Gregory D S, ed. (2008). Munda Languages. Routledge Language Family Series. Vol. 3. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-32890-6.
• Anderson, Gregory D. S. (2015). "Prosody, phonological domains and the structure of roots, stems and words in the Munda languages in a comparative/historical light". Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics. 2 (2): 163–183. doi:10.1515/jsall-2015-0009. S2CID 63980668.
• Anderson, Gregory D. S.; Boyle, John P. (2002). "Switch-Reference in South Munda". In Macken, Marlys A. (ed.). Papers from the 10th Annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society (PDF). Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University, South East Asian Studies Program. pp. 39–54. Archived from the original (PDF) on 16 June 2015.
• Brown, E. K., ed. (2006). "Munda Languages". Encyclopedia of Languages and Linguistics. Oxford: Elsevier Press.
• Donegan, Patricia; Stampe, David (2002). "South-East Asian Features in the Munda Languages: Evidence for the Analytic-to-Synthetic Drift of Munda". In Chew, Patrick (ed.). Proceedings of the 28th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, Special Session on Tibeto-Burman and Southeast Asian Linguistics, in honour of Prof. James A. Matisoff. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society. pp. 111–129.
• Newberry, J (2000). North Munda hieroglyphics. Victoria, BC: J Newberry.
• Śarmā, Devīdatta (2003). Munda: sub-stratum of Tibeto-Himalayan languages. Studies in Tibeto-Himalayan languages. Vol. 7. New Delhi: Mittal Publications. ISBN 81-7099-860-3.
• Varma, Siddheshwar (1978). Munda and Dravidian languages: a linguistic analysis. Hoshiarpur: Vishveshvaranand Vishva Bandhu Institute of Sanskrit and Indological Studies, Panjab University. OCLC 25852225.
• Zide, Norman H.; Anderson, G. D. S. (1999). Bhaskararao, P. (ed.). "The Proto-Munda Verb and Some Connections with Mon-Khmer". Working Papers International Symposium on South Asian Languages Contact and Convergence, and Typology. Tokyo: 401–421.
• Zide, Norman H.; Anderson, Gregory D. S. (2001). "The Proto-Munda Verb: Some Connections with Mon-Khmer". In Subbarao, K. V.; Bhaskararao, P. (eds.). Yearbook of South-Asian Languages and Linguistics. Delhi: Sage Publications. pp. 517–540. doi:10.1515/9783110245264.517.
• Anderson, Gregory D. S.; Zide, Norman H. (2001). "Recent Advances in the Reconstruction of the Proto-Munda Verb". In Brinton, Laurel J. (ed.). Historical Linguistics 1999: Selected papers from the 14th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Vancouver, 9–13 August 1999. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory. Vol. 215. Amsterdam: Benjamins. pp. 13–30. doi:10.1075/cilt.215.03and. ISBN 978-90-272-3722-4.

Historical migrations

• Blench, Roger (19 July 2019). The Munda maritime dispersal: when, where and what is the evidence? (PDF) (Report).
• Rau, Paul; Sidwell, Felix (2019). The Maritime Munda Hypothesis. ICAAL 8, Chiang Mai, Thailand, 29–31 August 2019. doi:10.5281/zenodo.3365316.
• Rau, Felix; Sidwell, Paul (2019). "The Maritime Munda Hypothesis". Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society. 12 (2): 31–53. hdl:10524/52454.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Munda languages.

• SEAlang Munda Languages Project
  • SEAlang Munda Etymological Dictionary
• Donegan & Stampe Munda site
• Munda languages at Living Tongues
• bibliography
• The Ho language webpage by K. David Harrison, Swarthmore College
• RWAAI (Repository and Workspace for Austroasiatic Intangible Heritage)
• http://hdl.handle.net/10050/00-0000-0000-0003-66EE-3@view Munda languages in RWAAI Digital Archive