The Munda languages are a group of closely related languages spoken by about nine million people in India and Bangladesh.[1][2] Historically, they have been called the Kolarian languages. 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.[3] Bhumij, Ho, Mundari, and Santali are notable Munda languages.[4][5][1]

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

The family is generally divided into two branches: North Munda, spoken in the Chota Nagpur Plateau of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, and Odisha, and South Munda, spoken in central Odisha and along the border between Andhra Pradesh and Odisha.[6][7][1]

North Munda, of which Santali is the most widely spoken, 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,[8] and partial, total, and complex reduplication, as well as switch-reference.[9][8] The Munda languages are also polysynthetic and agglutinating.[10][11]

In Munda sound systems, consonant sequences are infrequent except in the middle of a word. Other than in Korku, whose syllables show a distinction between high and low tone, accent is predictable in the Munda languages.

Origin

Most linguists, like Paul Sidwell (2018), suggest that the Proto-Munda language probably split from proto-Austroasiatic somewhere in Indochina and arrived on the coast of modern-day Odisha about 4000–3500 years ago and spread after the Indo-Aryan migration to the region.[12]

Rau and Sidwell (2019),[13][14] along with Blench (2019),[15] 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. Recent studies suggest that Munda languages spread as far as Eastern Uttar Pradesh and impacted Eastern Indo-Aryan languages.[16][17]

Classification

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

Diffloth (1974)

The bipartite Diffloth (1974) classification is widely cited:

• North Munda
  • Korku
  • Kherwarian
    • Kherwari branch: Birjia, Koraku
    • Mundari branch: Mundari, Bhumij, Asuri, Koda, Ho, Birhor, Kol, Turi
    • Santal branch: Santali, Mahali
• South Munda
  • Kharia–Juang: Kharia, Juang
  • Koraput Munda
    • Remo branch: Gata (Gta), Bondo (Remo), Bodo Gadaba (Gutob)
    • Savara branch [Sora–Juray–Gorum] : Parengi (Gorum), Sora (Savara), Juray, Lodhi

Diffloth (2005)

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

Anderson (1999)

Gregory Anderson's 1999 proposal is as follows.[18]

• North Munda
  • Korku
  • Kherwarian: Santali, Mundari
• South Munda (3 branches)
  • Kharia–Juang: Juang, Kharia
  • Sora–Gorum: Sora, Gorum
  • Gutob–Remo–Gtaʔ
    • Gutob–Remo: Gutob, Remo
    • Gtaʼ:[19] Plains Gtaʔ, Hill Gtaʔ

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)

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).[20]

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.

Sidwell (2015)

Paul Sidwell (2015:197)[21] considers Munda to consist of 6 coordinate branches, and does not accept South Munda as a unified subgroup.

• North Munda
  • Korku
  • Santali, Munda
• Sora–Gorum
• Juang
• Kharia
• Gutob–Remo
• Gtaʼ

Distribution

Reconstruction

The proto-forms have been reconstructed by Sidwell & Rau (2015: 319, 340-363).[22] Proto-Munda reconstruction has since been revised and improved by Rau (2019).[23][24]

See also

• Nihali language
• Munda peoples

References

Notes

General references

• 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, Roger Blench and Alicia Sanchez-Mazas (eds.). The Peopling of East Asia: Putting Together Archaeology, Linguistics and Genetics. RoutledgeCurzon. pp 79–82.

Further reading

• Gregory D S Anderson, ed. (2008). Munda Languages. Routledge Language Family Series. Vol. 3. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-32890-6.
• 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. (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.
• Donegan, Patricia; David Stampe (2002). South-East Asian Features in the Munda Languages: Evidence for the Analytic-to-Synthetic Drift of Munda. In Patrick Chew, 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. 111-129. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location (link)
• 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.
• Newberry, J (2000). North Munda hieroglyphics. Victoria BC CA: J Newberry.
• Varma, Siddheshwar (1978). Munda and Dravidian languages: a linguistic analysis. Hoshiarpur: Vishveshvaranand Vishva Bandhu Institute of Sanskrit and Indological Studies, Panjab University. OCLC 25852225.
• 2006-a. Munda Languages. In E. K. Brown (ed.) Encyclopedia of Languages and Linguistics. Oxford: Elsevier Press.
• Zide, Norman H. and G. D. S. Anderson. 1999. The Proto-Munda Verb and Some Connections with Mon-Khmer. In P. Bhaskararao (ed.) Working Papers International Symposium on South Asian Languages Contact and Convergence, and Typology. Tokyo. pp. 401–21.
• Zide, Norman H. and Gregory D. S. Anderson. 2001. The Proto-Munda Verb: Some Connections with Mon-Khmer. In K. V. Subbarao and P. Bhaskararao (eds.) Yearbook of South-Asian Languages and Linguistics-2001. Delhi: Sage Publications. pp. 517–40.
• Gregory D. S. Anderson and John P. Boyle. 2002. Switch-Reference in South Munda. In Marlys A. Macken (ed.) Papers from the 10th Annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society. Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University, South East Asian Studies Program, Monograph Series Press. pp. 39–54.
• Gregory D. S. Anderson and Norman H. Zide. 2001. Recent Advances in the Reconstruction of the Proto-Munda Verb. In L. Brinton (ed.) Historical Linguistics 1999. Amsterdam: Benjamins. pp. 13–30.

Historical migrations

• Blench, Roger. 2019. The Munda maritime dispersal: when, where and what is the evidence?
• Rau, Felix and Paul Sidwell 2019. "The Maritime Munda Hypothesis." ICAAL 8, Chiang Mai, Thailand, 29–31 August 2019. doi:10.5281/zenodo.3365316
• Rau, Felix and Paul Sidwell 2019. "The Maritime Munda Hypothesis." Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society 12.2 (2019): 31-53

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Munda languages.

• SEAlang Munda Languages Project
  • SEAlang Munda Etymological Dictionary
• Munda Dictionaries Project (Kiel, Peterson)
• 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

На других языках

[es] Lenguas munda

[fr] Langues munda

[it] Lingue munda

[ru] Языки мунда