Munda languages explained

Munda
Also Known As:Mundaic
Region:Indian subcontinent
Ethnicity:Munda peoples
Familycolor:Austroasiatic
Child1:North Munda
Child2:Sora–Gorum
Child3:Juang
Child4:Kharia
Child5:Gutob–Remo
Child6:Gtaʼ
Protoname:Proto-Munda
Iso2:mun
Iso5:mun
Glotto:mund1335
Glottorefname:Mundaic
Map:Munda languages map.svg
Mapcaption: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] Historically, they have been called the Kolarian languages.[3] 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.[4] Bhumij, Ho, Mundari, and Santali are notable Munda languages.[5] [6]

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.[7] [8]

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.

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, and partial, total, and complex reduplication, as well as switch-reference. The Munda languages are also polysynthetic and agglutinating.[9] In Munda sound systems, consonant sequences are infrequent except in the middle of a word.

Origin

Many linguists suggest that the Proto-Munda language probably split from proto-Austroasiatic somewhere in Indochina. Paul Sidwell (2018) suggests they arrived on the coast of modern-day Odisha about 4000–3500 years ago (BCE) and spread after the Indo-Aryan migration to the region.[10] [11]

Rau and Sidwell (2019),[12] [13] along with Blench (2019),[14] 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 spread as far as Eastern Uttar Pradesh and impacted Eastern Indo-Aryan languages.[15] [16]

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:

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.[17]

[18] 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).[19]

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).

Sidwell (2015)

Paul Sidwell (2015:197)[20] considers Munda to consist of 6 coordinate branches, and does not accept South Munda as a unified subgroup.

Distribution

Language name Number of speakers (2011) Location
Korwa28,400 Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand
Birjia25,000 Jharkhand, West Bengal
Mundari (inc. Bhumij) 1,600,000 Jharkhand, Odisha, Bihar
Asur7,000 Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha
Ho1,400,000 Jharkhand, Odisha, West Bengal
Birhor2,000 Jharkhand
Santali7,400,000 Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar, Assam, Bangladesh, Nepal
2,000 Jharkhand
Korku727,000Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra
298,000 Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh
30,400 Odisha
Gtaʼ4,500 Odisha
Bonda9,000 Odisha
Gutob10,000 Odisha, Andhra Pradesh
Gorum20 Odisha, Andhra Pradesh
410,000 Odisha, Andhra Pradesh
25,000 Odisha
25,000 Odisha, West Bengal
Koda47,300West Bengal, Odisha, Bangladesh
Kol1,600West Bengal, Jharkhand, Bangladesh

Reconstruction

See main article: Proto-Munda language. The proto-forms have been reconstructed by Sidwell & Rau (2015: 319, 340–363).[21] Proto-Munda reconstruction has since been revised and improved by Rau (2019).[22] [23]

See also

References

General references

Further reading

Historical migrations

External links

Notes and References

  1. Book: 23 January 2016 . Hock . Hans Henrich . Hans Henrich Hock . Bashir . Elena . Elena Bashir . The Languages and Linguistics of South Asia. 10.1515/9783110423303 . 9783110423303 .
  2. Web site: Santhali . Ethnologue . 21 January 2024 . en.
  3. Book: Anderson . Gregory D. S. . The Munda Languages . 8 April 2015 . Routledge . 978-1-317-82886-0 . 5 . en.
  4. Bradley (2012) notes, MK in the wider sense including the Munda languages of eastern South Asia is also known as Austroasiatic
  5. Web site: Pinnow. Heinz-Jurgen. A comparative study of the verb in Munda language. Sealang.com. 22 March 2015.
  6. Web site: Daladier. Anne. Kinship and Spirit Terms Renewed as Classifiers of "Animate" Nouns and Their Reduced Combining Forms in Austroasiatic. Elanguage. 22 March 2015.
  7. Bhattacharya . S. . Munda studies: A new classification of Munda . 1975 . Indo-Iranian Journal . 17 . 1 . 1572-8536 . 97–101 . 10.1163/000000075794742852. 162284988 .
  8. Web site: Munda languages . The Language Gulper . 14 May 2019.
  9. Donegan. Patricia Jane. Stampe. David. South-East Asian Features in the Munda Languages. Berkley Linguistics Society.
  10. Sidwell, Paul. 2018. Austroasiatic Studies: state of the art in 2018. Presentation at the Graduate Institute of Linguistics, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, 22 May 2018.
  11. Web site: Sidwell AA studies state of the art 2018.pdf . 12 May 2023 . Google Docs.
  12. Rau, Felix. Sidwell, Paul. Paul Sidwell. The Munda Maritime Hypothesis. 2019. 1836-6821. Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society (JSEALS). 12. 2. 10524/52454.
  13. Rau, Felix and Paul Sidwell 2019. "The Maritime Munda Hypothesis." ICAAL 8, Chiang Mai, Thailand, 29–31 August 2019.
  14. Blench, Roger. 2019. The Munda maritime dispersal: when, where and what is the evidence?
  15. Ivani, Jessica K; Paudyal, Netra; Peterson, John (2021). Indo-Aryan – a house divided? Evidence for the east–west Indo-Aryan divide and its significance for the study of northern South Asia. Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics, 7(2):287–326.
  16. Web site: The spread of Munda in prehistoric South Asia -the view from areal typology To appear in: Volume in Celebration of the Bicentenary of Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute (Deemed University). John Peterson. October 2021. 1 September 2022.
  17. Anderson, Gregory D.S. (1999). "A new classification of the Munda languages: Evidence from comparative verb morphology." Paper presented at 209th meeting of the American Oriental Society, Baltimore, MD.
  18. Anderson. G.D.S.. 2008. "Gtaʔ" The Munda Languages. Routledge Language Family Series. London: Routledge. pp. 682–763. Routledge Language Family Series. 3. 682–763.
  19. Book: Anderson , Gregory D S . A New Classification of South Munda: Evidence from Comparative Verb Morphology. Indian Linguistics. 62. 2001. Linguistic Society of India. Poona. 21–36.
  20. Sidwell, Paul. 2015. "Austroasiatic classification." In Jenny, Mathias and Paul Sidwell, eds (2015). The Handbook of Austroasiatic Languages. Leiden: Brill.
  21. Sidwell, Paul and Felix Rau (2015). "Austroasiatic Comparative-Historical Reconstruction: An Overview." In Jenny, Mathias and Paul Sidwell, eds (2015). The Handbook of Austroasiatic Languages. Leiden: Brill.
  22. Rau, Felix. (2019). Advances in Munda historical phonology. Zenodo.
  23. Rau, Felix. (2019). Munda cognate set with proto-Munda reconstructions (Version 0.1.0) [Data set]. Zenodo.

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