Munda languages

The Munda languages are a group of closely related languages spoken by about nine million people in India, Bangladesh and Nepal. 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. 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 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. 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 (c. 2000 BCE) and spread after the Indo-Aryan migration to the region.

Rau and Sidwell (2019), along with Blench (2019), 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.

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:


 * Munda
 * 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.


 * Munda
 * 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: 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).

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) considers Munda to consist of 6 coordinate branches, and does not accept South Munda as a unified subgroup.


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

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