14 Facts About Austroasiatic

Austroasiatic languages have a disjunct distribution across Southeast Asia and parts of India, Bangladesh, Nepal and East Asia, separated by regions where other languages are spoken.

Austroasiatic languages are further characterized as having unusually large vowel inventories and employing some sort of register contrast, either between modal voice and breathy voice or between modal voice and creaky voice.

However, some Austroasiatic languages have lost the register contrast by evolving more diphthongs or in a few cases, such as Vietnamese, tonogenesis.

Austroasiatic therefore takes the conservative view that the thirteen branches of Austroasiatic should be treated as equidistant on current evidence.

In general the family is thought to have diversified too quickly for a deeply nested structure to have developed, since Proto-Austroasiatic speakers are believed by Sidwell to have radiated out from the central Mekong river valley relatively quickly.

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Austroasiatic would have had two possible dispersal routes from the western periphery of the Pearl River watershed of Lingnan, which would have been either a coastal route down the coast of Vietnam, or downstream through the Mekong River via Yunnan.

Austroasiatic dispersed coastal maritime routes and upstream through river valleys.

Hence, this points to a relatively late riverine dispersal of Austroasiatic as compared to Sino-Tibetan, whose speakers had a distinct non-riverine culture.

Roger Blench proposes that there might have been other primary branches of Austroasiatic that are now extinct, based on substrate evidence in modern-day languages.

Austroasiatic is an integral part of the controversial Austric hypothesis, which includes the Austronesian languages, and in some proposals the Kra–Dai languages and the Hmong–Mien languages.

From Mainland Southeast Asia, the Austroasiatic speakers expanded into the Indian-subcontinent and Maritime Southeast Asia.

Early Austroasiatic speakers are estimated to have originated from an lineage, which split from Ancestral East Asians between 25,000 and 15,000 years ago, and were among the first wave to replace distinct Australasian-related groups in Insular Southeast Asia.

Early Austroasiatic people were found to be best represented by the Mlabri people in modern day Thailand.

The early Austroasiatic speakers are suggested to have been hunter-gatherers but became rice-agriculturalists quite early, spreading from Mainland Southeast Asia northwards to the Yangtze river, westwards into the Indian subcontinent, and southwards into Insular Southeast Asia.