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Concept
Austroasiatic languages
Summary
The Austroasiatic languages ˌɒstroʊ.eɪʒiˈætɪk,_ˌɔː- , are a large language family in Mainland Southeast Asia, South Asia and East Asia. These languages are scattered throughout parts of Thailand, Laos, India, Myanmar, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Nepal, and southern China. Austroasiatic constitute the majority languages of Vietnam and Cambodia. There are around 117 million speakers of Austroasiatic languages, of which more than two-thirds are Vietnamese speakers. Of these languages, only Vietnamese, Khmer, and Mon have a long-established recorded history. Only two have official status as modern national languages: Vietnamese in Vietnam and Khmer in Cambodia. The Mon language is a recognized indigenous language in Myanmar and Thailand. In Myanmar, the Wa language is the de facto official language of Wa State. Santali is one of the 22 scheduled languages of India. The rest of the languages are spoken by minority groups and have no official status.
Ethnologue identifies 168 Austroasiatic languages. These form thirteen established families (plus perhaps Shompen, which is poorly attested, as a fourteenth), which have traditionally been grouped into two, as Mon–Khmer, and Munda. However, one recent classification posits three groups (Munda, Mon-Khmer, and Khasi–Khmuic), while another has abandoned Mon–Khmer as a taxon altogether, making it synonymous with the larger family.
Austroasiatic languages have a disjunct distribution across Southeast Asia and parts of India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Southern China, separated by regions where other languages are spoken. They appear to be the extant original languages of Mainland Southeast Asia, with the neighboring, and sometimes surrounding, Kra–Dai, Hmong-Mien, Austronesian, and Sino-Tibetan languages being the result of later migrations.
The name Austroasiatic was coined by Wilhelm Schmidt (austroasiatisch) based on auster, the Latin word for "South" (but idiosyncratically used by Schmidt to refer to the southeast), and "Asia".
Official source
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