Austric languages

The Austric languages are a proposed language family that includes the Austronesian languages spoken in Taiwan, Maritime Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, and Madagascar, as well as Kra–Dai and Austroasiatic languages spoken in Mainland Southeast Asia and South Asia. A genetic relationship between these language families is seen as plausible by some scholars, but remains unproven. Additionally, Hmong–Mien languages are included by some linguists, and even Japanese was speculated to be Austric in an early version of the hypothesis by Paul K. Benedict. The Austric macrofamily was first proposed by the German missionary Wilhelm Schmidt in 1906. He showed phonological, morphological, and lexical evidence to support the existence of an Austric phylum consisting of Austroasiatic and Austronesian. Schmidt's proposal had a mixed reception among scholars of Southeast Asian languages, and received only little scholarly attention in the following decades. Research interest into Austric resurged in the late 20th century, culminating in a series of articles by La Vaughn H. Hayes who presented a corpus of Proto-Austric vocabulary together with a reconstruction of Proto-Austric phonology, and by Lawrence Reid, focussing on morphological evidence. Reid (2005) lists the following pairs as "probable" cognates between Proto-Austroasiatic and Proto-Austronesian. Among the morphological evidence, he compares reconstructed affixes such as the following, and notes that shared infixes are less likely to be borrowed (for a further discussion of infixes in Southeast Asian languages, see also Barlow 2022). prefix *pa- 'causative' (Proto-Austroasiatic, Proto-Austronesian) infix *-um- 'agentive' (Proto-Austroasiatic, Proto-Austronesian) infix *-in- 'instrumental' (Proto-Austroasiatic), 'nominalizer' (Proto-Austronesian) Below are 10 selected Austric lexical comparisons by Diffloth (1994), as cited in Sidwell & Reid (2021): The first extension to Austric was first proposed Wilhelm Schmidt himself, who speculated about including Japanese within Austric, mainly because of assumed similarities between Japanese and the Austronesian languages.

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Related concepts (6)

Austronesian peoples

The Austronesian peoples, sometimes referred to as Austronesian-speaking peoples, are a large group of peoples in Taiwan, Malay Peninsula, parts of Mainland Southeast Asia, Maritime Southeast Asia, Micronesia, coastal New Guinea, Island Melanesia, Polynesia, and Madagascar that speak Austronesian languages. They also include indigenous ethnic minorities in Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand, Hainan, the Comoros, and the Torres Strait Islands.

East Asia

East Asia is the easternmost region of Asia, which is defined in both geographical and ethno-cultural terms. The modern states of East Asia include China, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan. Hong Kong and Macau, two small coastal quasi-dependent territories located in the south of China, are officially highly autonomous but are under Chinese sovereignty. Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau are some of the world's largest and most prosperous economies.

Austric languages