Munda languages


The []Munda languages are a group of closely-related languages spoken by about eleven million people in India, Bangladesh and Nepal. Historically, they have been called the Kolarian languages. They constitute a branch of the Austroasiatic language family, which means they are 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. Bhumij, Ho, Mundari, and Santali are notable Munda languages.
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.
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 numbers, two genders, 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 generally synthetic and agglutinating. In Munda sound systems, consonant sequences are infrequent except in the middle of words.
The Munda languages are often interpreted as prime examples of father tongues since the majority of native speakers of the these languages tend to display the Y-chromosome haplogroup of the original linguistic founding population in higher frequencies, and that Y-haplogroup signifies the linguistic origin, rather than based on a maternal haplogroup.

Origin

Many linguists suggest that the Proto-Munda language probably split from Proto-Austroasiatic somewhere in Indochina. Studies by Chaubey et al., Arunkumaret al., Metspalu
et al., and Tätte et al. all show that the Munda branch of the Austroasiatic family was created as the result of a male-biased linguistic intrusion into the Indian subcontinent from Southeast Asia during the Late Neolithic period, which carried the paternal lineage O1b1a1a into India from either Meghalaya or the sea. These studies and analyses confirm George van Driem's Munda Father tongue hypothesis. Paul Sidwell suggests they arrived on the coast of modern-day Odisha about 4000–3500 years ago and spread after the Indo-Aryan migration to the region.
Rau and Sidwell, along with Blench, suggest that Pre-Proto-Munda had arrived in the Mahanadi River Delta around 1500 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.

Classification

Munda consists of five uncontroversial branches. However, their interrelationship is debated.

Diffloth (1974)

The bipartite Diffloth classification is widely cited:
Diffloth retains Koraput but abandons South Munda and places Kharia–Juang with the northern languages:

Anderson (1999)

's 1999 proposal is as follows.
  • Munda
  • *North Munda
  • **Korku
  • **Kherwarian: Santali, Mundari
  • *South Munda
  • **Kharia–Juang: Juang, Kharia
  • **Sora–Gorum: Sora, Gorum
  • **Gutob–Remo–Gtaʔ
  • ***Gutob–Remo: Gutob, Remo
  • ***Gtaʼ: 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 included five branches for South Munda.

Anderson (2001)

Anderson follows Diffloth 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, and Gutob–Remo–Gtaʼ.
His South Munda branch contains the following five branches, but the North Munda branch is the same as those of Diffloth and Anderson.
  • Note: "↔" = shares certain innovative isoglosses. In Austronesian and Papuan linguistics, this has been called a "linkage" by Malcolm Ross.

    Sidwell (2015)

considers Munda to consist of 6 coordinate branches, and does not accept South Munda as a unified subgroup.
  • Munda
  • *North Munda
  • **Korku
  • **Kherwarian
  • *Sora–Gorum
  • *Juang
  • *Kharia
  • *Gutob–Remo
  • *Gtaʼ

    Phonology

Consonants, vowels, and syllable

The Munda languages share similar sets of phonemes with regional languages in their respective areas. Inherited Austroasiatic "checked" glottalised stop and nasalised final consonants found in some Munda languages such as Mundari and Kharia may stand out in South Asia. One key feature in the Munda consonants is the distinction between dental and retroflex stops in lexical level exists in most Munda languages except Sora and Gorum, reflecting a general characteristic of South Asian phonology. Because of South Asian areal convergence, Munda languages generally have fewer vowels than their Eastern Austroasiatic relatives. Additionally, Sora has glottalised vowels. Like any other Austroasiatic languages, the Munda languages make extensive uses of diphthongs and triphthongs. Larger vowel sequences can be found, with an extreme example of Santali kɔeaeae meaning ‘he will ask for him’. Most Munda languages have registers but lack tones with an exception of Korku, which has acquired two contrastive tones within the South Asian linguistic area: an unmarked high and a marked low. The general syllable shape is V, and the preferred structure for disyllables is CVCV. South Munda displays tendency toward initial clusters, CCVC word shape, diphthong reflexes, with best examples are manifested in the Gtaʔ case.
As stated above, tonogenesis in Korku and continuous CCVC/sesquisyllabic development in Gtaʔ, both of which were unfolded inside the South Asian linguistic area, seem to have nothing related to contact-driven restructuring in the subcontinent. It is also unclear whether they were directly connected to areal convergences in the Eastern Austroasiatic languages. Munda word shape is dictated by a general phonotactical phenomenon called bimoraic constraint, which requires free-standing nominal stems to stay disyllabic or to obtain weight at the stressed syllable; that is, monosyllabic free forms of nouns must be expanded to remain heavy. See #Vocabulary for comparison.

Munda phonemes

The following table compiles lists of consonantal and vowel systems of several Munda languages, mainly from,, and many others on International Phonetic Alphabet.
PlosivesRetroflex StopsAffricatesFricativesNasalsRhoticsLateralsGlidesVowels
Santalip b t d k g ʔʈ ɖt͡ʃ d͡ʒs hm n ɲ ŋr ɽlw ja i u o e ɔ ɛ ə
Hop b t d k g ʔʈ ɖt͡ʃ d͡ʒs hm n ŋrlw ja i u o e
Mundarip b t d k g ʔʈ ɖt͡ʃ d͡ʒs hm n ɳ ɲ ŋr ɽlw ja i u o e
Keraʔ Mundarip b t d k g ʔʈ ɖt͡ʃ d͡ʒs hm n ɲ ŋr ɽlw ja i u o e
Asurip b t d k gʈ ɖt͡ʃ d͡ʒs hm n ŋr ɽlw ja i u o e
Kɔɖap b t d k g ʔʈ ɖt͡ʃ d͡ʒʃ hm n ŋrla i u ɔ ɛ
Turip b t d k g ʔʈ ɖt͡ʃ d͡ʒs hm n ɳ ɲ ŋɾ ɽlʋ ja i u ɔ ɛ ə
Korkup b t d k g ʔʈ ɖt͡ʃ d͡ʒv s hm n ɳ ɲ ŋr ɽlw ja i u o e
Khariap b t d k g ʔʈ ɖt͡ʃ d͡ʒf s hm n ɲ ŋr ɽlw ja i u o e
Juangp b t d k gʈ ɖt͡ʃ d͡ʒsm n ɳ ɲ ŋrl ɭja i u o e ɔ
Sorap b t d k g ʔd͡ʒs zm n ɲ ŋr ɽlw ja i u o e ɔ ɛ ə ɨ
Gorump b t k g ʔʈ ɖs zm n ŋr ɽlja i u e ɔ
Remop b t d k g ʔʈ ɖt͡s d͡z t͡ʃ d͡ʒv s zm n ɳ ɲ ŋr ɽlw ja i u o e
Gutobp b t d k g ʔʈ ɖt͡s d͡z t͡ʃ d͡ʒs z hm n ɲ ŋr ɽlja i u o e
Gtaʔp b t d k g ʔʈ ɖt͡ʃ d͡ʒs hm n ŋr ɽlw ja i u o e æ/ɛ

Word prominence

posited overarching assumptions that all Munda languages have completely redesigned their word prosodic structure from proto-Austroasiatic rising intonation, iambic and reduced vowel, sesquisyllabic structure to Indic norms of trochaic, falling rhythm, stable or assimilationist consonants and harmonised vowels. That makes them different from Eastern Austroasiatic languages at almost every level. criticised Donegan & Stampe by pointing out that the overall picture appears much more complicated and diverse and that generalisations of Donegan & Stampe are not supported by the instrumental data of the various Munda languages. describes word-rising contour in monosyllables and second syllable prominence in Kharia content words. Even the presence of clitics and affixes does not drive Kharia word prosodic structure to that of a trochaic and falling system. reports final-syllable stress in all but CVC.CV stems in Mundari., Horo and found that the Sora disyllables are always iambic, reduced first syllable vowel space, and second syllable prominence. Even CV.CCə words show final-syllable prominence. note that the Sora vowels of the first syllables are centralised and that vowels in the second syllables are more representative of the canonical vowel space.
describes about Santali prosody that "stress is always released in the second syllable of the word regardless of whether it is an open or a closed syllable". His analysis was confirmed by, whose acoustic data clearly shows that the second syllable in Santali is always the prominent syllable, with a greater intensity of stress and a rising contour.
reports that in Korku, the final syllable is heavier than the initial syllable, and within a disyllable, stress is preferentially released at the final syllable. The analyses inferred from databases show that despite exhibiting some variants, most Munda prominence alignments are in line with other Austroasiatic languages, with a predictable final-syllable prominence in a prosodic word. Again, make a claim on rhythmic holism that does not conform with the data presented by individual Munda languages.