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The Austroasiatic language phylum spans the breadth of South and Southeast
Asia, with more than 150 languages over a dozen branches. Some are spoken
by villages of just a few dozen people, while others have millions of
speakers such as the national languages Cambodian and Vietnamese.
Historically much of the Austroasiatic region has been divided and overlain
by unrelated language families, creating a vast zone of ethnolinguistic
contact and diversity. This creates a special imperative for us to turn to
comparative linguistics to solves great issues of regional (pre)history
that other disciplines cannot address.
Yet, despite more than a century of comparative Austroasiatic studies,
scholars have yet to present an explicitly justified internal genetic
classification of the phylum upon which specialists can agree. The text is
divided into two main parts; the first charts the emergence of the
Austroasiatic hypothesis and its various guises, and reviews much of the
literature which has addressed how constituent branches may (or may not)
relate to each other, while the second part looks at each branch in detail,
examining the history of scholarship and summarizing the state of the art.
Many relevant maps and diagrams are reproduced, including some colour plates.
Table of contents
1 Introduction
2 The Austroasiatic Phylum
2.1 1850–1950: The dawn of a new family
2.2 1900–1950: The neogrammarians versus the diffusionists
2.2.1 A new neogrammarian perspective
2.2.2 Reception and influence of Schmidt’s proposals
2.2.3 The question of Vietnamese
2.2.4 Appeal to authority
2.3 1951–present: the age of lexicostatistics
2.3.1 The bridging period
2.3.2 Lexicostatistics makes its mark
2.3.3 Reception and subsequent influence of Thomas and Headley’s analyses
2.3.4 The question of more-detailed subgrouping
2.3.5 Recent analyses
2.4 Concluding remarks: the Austroasiatic phylum and homeland
3 Austroasiatic Branches
3.1 Aslian
3.2 Bahnaric
3.3 Katuic
3.4 Khasian
3.5 Khmeric
3.6 Khmuic
3.7 Monic
3.7.1 Mon
3.7.2 Nyah Kur
3.8 Munda
3.9 Nicobaric
3.10 Palaungic
3.11 Pearic
3.12 Vietic
References
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