Proto-Munda is the reconstructed
proto-language
In the tree model of historical linguistics, a proto-language is a postulated ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. Proto-languages are usually unattest ...
of the
Munda languages
The Munda languages are a group of closely related languages spoken by about nine million people in India and Bangladesh. Historically, they have been called the Kolarian languages. They constitute a branch of the Austroasiatic language famil ...
of
South Asia
South Asia is the southern subregion of Asia, which is defined in both geographical and ethno-cultural terms. The region consists of the countries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.;;;;;;;; ...
. It has been reconstructed by Sidwell & Rau (2015). According to Sidwell Proto-Munda language split from proto- Austro-asiatic in
Indo china
Mainland Southeast Asia, also known as the Indochinese Peninsula or Indochina, is the continental portion of Southeast Asia. It lies east of the Indian subcontinent and south of Mainland China and is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the west an ...
and arrived in coast of Odisha around 4000-3500 year ago.
[Sidwell, Paul. 2018]
Austroasiatic Studies: state of the art in 2018
Presentation at the Graduate Institute of Linguistics, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, 22 May 2018.
Reconstruction
The following Proto-Munda lexical proto-forms have been reconstructed by Sidwell & Rau (2015: 319, 340-363).
[Sidwell, Paul and Felix Rau (2015). "Austroasiatic Comparative-Historical Reconstruction: An Overview." In Jenny, Mathias and Paul Sidwell, eds (2015). ''The Handbook of Austroasiatic Languages''. Leiden: Brill.] Two asterisks are given to denote the tentative, preliminary state of the proto-language reconstruction.
Proto-Munda reconstruction has since been revised and improved by Rau (2019).
See also
*
Proto-Austroasiatic language
Proto-Austroasiatic is the reconstructed ancestor of the Austroasiatic languages. Proto-Mon–Khmer (i.e., all Austroasiatic branches except for Munda) has been reconstructed in Harry L. Shorto's ''Mon–Khmer Comparative Dictionary'', while a ...
References
{{Austro-Asiatic languages
Munda languages
Aslian
The Aslian languages () are the southernmost branch of Austroasiatic languages spoken on the Malay Peninsula. They are the languages of many of the '' Orang Asli'', the aboriginal inhabitants of the peninsula. The total number of native speakers ...