Southeast Asian mainland: linguistic history

33

Southeast Asian mainland: linguistic history

Paul Sidwell

The major language families of mainland Southeast Asia have reconstructible his-

tories of expansion extending back for at least five thousand years, commencing with

the initial spread of Austroasiatic languages from a homeland region that is still

under debate.

Mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA) displays a mosaic of ethnolinguistic diversity that reflects hundreds of languages belonging to five major families: Austroasiatic, Tai-Kadai (Kra-Dai), Tibeto-Burman, Miao-Yao (Hmong-Mien), and Austronesian (Figure 33.1). The fact that we can readily recognize clearly defined language families means that we can apply the methods of comparative linguistics to reconstruct intermediate and ancestral languages, showing how they likely branched and diversified in prehis-tory. The lexicons of these now lost ancestral tongues can speak to their level of cultural development, geographical locations, and societal interactions, in ways complemen-tary to the results of other historical disciplines.

The documented history of MSEA is largely restricted to the second millennium ce; prior to that, from around the middle of the 1st millennium ce, there are only modest epigraphic texts and tantalizing references in Chinese chronicles. Some of those texts are the products of societies that remain largely in place, if greatly changed, such as Cambodia. Yet others – for example the Dvaravati Mon of 1st-millennium Thailand, or Champa which flourished for over a thousand years in central Vietnam – are frus-tratingly fragmented as conquests, migrations, and assimilation variously ended their civilizations, leaving their traces deep within what became foreign territory.

Consequently, comparative linguistics, and where appropriate epigraphy and philol-ogy, can offer significant insights into the prehistoric origins, migrations, and interac-tions of MSEA peoples. The narrative so revealed is of a region dominated early on by Austroasiatic languages, subsequently divided and replaced by great intrusive wedges coming in from the north, and displaced inland from the coasts by expanding trade

The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, Edited by Immanuel Ness.© 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.DOI: 10.1002/9781444351071.wbeghm833

Figure 33.1 Language family distributions on the mainland of Southeast Asia, with an inset showing the likely directions of prehistoric migration of ancestral Indo-Aryan, Tibeto-Burman, Tai and Austronesian speakers, presumably overlying a former Austroasiatic continuum (main map after Lebar et al. 1964). Base mapping by Australian National University, College of Asia and the Pacific.

Tai-Kadai

Sino-Tibetan

Miao-Yao

Austroasiatic

Austronesian

Tai

Kadai

Chinese

Tibeto-Burman

Karen

Miao and Yao

Mon-Khmer

Chamic (Vietnam and

Cambodia) and Moken

(Burma and Thailand)

10°

20°

100° 110°

MUONG

Gulf of

Tonkin

MOUNTAINKHMER

KHMER

KHASI

VIETNAMES

E

NAGA

CHIN

BURMESE

KACHIN

TAI

TAI

CHINESE

TAI

INDO-ARYAN

CHAMICMOKEN

VIETNAMESE

South

China

SeaGulf of

Martaban

Gulf of

Siam

110°E80°E

20°N

10°N

Bay ofBengal

AndamanSea

INDIANOCEAN

Present distribution of Austroasiatic languages (including Munda in India)

10000

kilometres

AUSTRONESIAN

INDO-ARYAN TIBETO-

BURMANTAI

southeast asian mainland: linguistic history 3

networks and empires. The movements south out of China have never really stopped: the text that follows works roughly back in time from the more recent to the more ancient periods of human movement and settlement.

Hmong-Mien

The Hmong-Mien languages (also called: Miao-Yao) consist of two subfamilies: Hmongic (about 5 million speakers) and Mienic (about 1.3 million speakers). Speakers are found mainly in the southern Chinese provinces of Guizhou, Guangxi, Yunnan, Hunan, and Guangdong, and in northern Vietnam and Laos (with scattered groups in Thailand and Myanmar/Burma). Remarkably, the Mienic languages are much less diverse than Hmongic, yet are spread over much of the same region. This geographical distribution does not immediately suggest a likely origin point for the family, although it does indicate that similar historical events and processes underlay the dispersal of the family, which must have occurred after the initial separation of proto-Hmong and proto-Mien.

Despite a tradition of folk tales that place Hmong-Mien origins in the distant north (Savina 1924), linguistic evidence firmly places their homeland in central or southern China. Thanks to a series of comparative studies (most recently: Ratliff 2010), the history of the family is now fairly well reconstructed, and the results suggest that the ancestral language had words for both rice-growing and hunting, and terms for animals and plants of the Yangzi River basin (pangolin, river deer, the “painted eyebrow” thrush, cogon grass, Allium (onion family), and the medicinal plant Houttuynia cordata). Additionally, numerous ancient loans from Old Chinese and Tibeto-Burman are evident. These data suggest that the proto-Hmong-Mien speakers began dispersing southward out of the Yangzi River basin around 2,500 years ago, perhaps connected to the movement of Han Chinese (chapter 25).

A much later phase of Hmong-Mien migration began in the 1840s, and accounts for many of the scattered populations today in Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos. Events such as the Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion stimulated substantial movements of peoples, especially from Guizhou, Guangdong, and Guangxi, many of whom traveled via the Yunnan-Guizhou plateau into Indo-China, following a route that Edmondson and Jinfang (1996) call “the language corridor.” These migrations are still relatively well remembered, and some communities still maintain contact with their now distant relatives remaining in China.

Austronesian

While there are more than 1,200 Austronesian languages spread across the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, linguists also identify two small groups of “mainland Austronesian” speakers. These are the Moken (also known as Sea Gypsies or Sea Nomads in English, Selung in Myanmar/Burma, Chao Ley in Thailand) who live among the islands off the west coast of the isthmus of Kra; and the speakers of Aceh-Chamic,

4 southeast asian mainland: linguistic history

including the Chamic languages of Indo-China and Hainan, and (somewhat contro-versially) the Acehnese spoken in northern Sumatra. Austronesian speakers (probably radiating from northwest Borneo, and more closely related to Malayic tribes than other groups) began settling the coasts of Indo-China and the Gulf of Thailand sometime before the 5th century bce. The sequence of this prehistoric migration, and its specific ethnic makeup, may never be known, but some inferences can be made (see also chapter 35).

The Moken are a small, scattered group of just a few thousand speakers who may represent the remnants of previously more widespread occupation of the Kra isthmus and Malay peninsula, before the area became a much-prized and occasionally con-tested overland section of the coastal India–China trade route. The thesis by Larish (1999), which includes a reconstruction of proto-Moken, sketches out various struc-tural changes, including innovations in the reflexes of PMP *q, diphthongs, and stress patterns, which demonstrate that proto-Moken must have been somewhat older than Malayo-Aceh-Cham, and therefore likely to reflect the oldest mainland Austronesian group for which evidence survives.

A group of Austronesians (the Aceh-Chams) settled on the Vietnam coast around 500 bce and eventually built a great Hindu (and later Muslim) civilization – Champa – which today exists only in the form of monumental ruins frequented by tourists. The Acehnese of Sumatra and small Chamic communities of Cambodia, Vietnam, and Hainan are direct descendants of Chamic society, which no longer exists in its historical heartland. Fortunately, the history of these migrations can largely be reconstructed by linguists, for example proto-Chamic (Thurgood 1999) with extensive inferences about Chamic history, and other insightful analyses (Sidwell 2005; Vickery 2005).

During the 1st millennium ce, Champa emerged as a powerful alliance of port cities that came to rival Angkor and Vietnam as a major regional power. Sometime early in this process there was an emigration of northern Chams to Sumatra, establishing what was eventually to become Aceh. It was a strategic move to control an important stretch of coastal route running through the Straits of Malacca, now known as Melaka, as the shorter trans-isthmus route was controlled by others (especially Funan/Cambodia and Dvaravati for much of the 1st millennium ce).

But the dominance of Champa began to give way in the 10th century. The northern capital of Indrapura was sacked by Vietnamese in 982, and many northern Cham left; the U Tsat minority living in Hainan today began with an emigration of Cham from that time. Conflict with Cambodia in the 12th and 13th centuries greatly weakened Champa, leaving the door open for Vietnam to push south and progressively seize more and more territory. By 1471 the Cham polities Amaravati and Vijaya (roughly from Da Nang to Qui Nhon) had fallen. The “Sejarah Melayu” records that after the fall of Vijaya, the two sons of King Pau Kubah fled, with Syah Indera Berman going to Melaka and Syah Pau Ling going to Aceh, where he started the line of Aceh kings (al-Ahmadi, quoted in Thurgood 1999: 22).

The central Cham polity of Kauthara survived until the early 17th century, but the period was marked by substantial emigrations into the central highlands. Strikingly, the present-day area of Chamic-speaking peoples in the central highlands corresponds almost precisely, in terms of northern and southern extents, to the former coastal lati-


tudes of Kauthara. Many Cham also moved up the Mekong river into Cambodia, which by then lacked a central government and had become a neglected backwater. These migrations continued off and on through the 18th century, laying the bases for the substantial western Cham communities who still live there today. The southern Cham state of Panduranga (Vietnamese: Phan Rang) persisted as an entity into the 1830s, when it was finally absorbed into Vietnam.

Kra-Dai

Kra-Dai (also Tai-Kadai, Daic), now representing some of the most important lan-guages in MSEA, is another family that diversified and spread out of southern China over the last 2,500 years, creating one of two great wedges that divided the older Aus-troasiatic domination of MSEA. It is in southern China that the greatest diversity of Kra-Dai languages still remains. There are three principal sub-branches: Kra – six small languages spoken mainly in Guizhou and the Vietnam-China borderlands; Hlai – about a dozen languages spoken on Hainan Island (glossed as “Kadai” in Figure 33.1); and Kam-Tai. The latter further separates into Kam-Sui and Tai. Kam-Sui consists of about a dozen languages spoken mainly in Guizhou, Guangxi, Yunnan, and pockets of northern Laos. The large Tai group includes more than 60 languages (including Thai and Lao) that are widespread through MSEA and as far west as Assam (India).

The Northern and Central Tai languages – collectively known as Zhuang in China – occupy the original Tai heartland, mainly Guangxi, Hunan, and Vietnam north of the Red River; also historically much of Guangdong, where Tai speakers where prob-ably constituted many of the “Hundred Yueh (barbarians)” mentioned in Chinese annals.

The Southwestern Tai spread rapidly over a vast area, and remain so close that many are still highly mutually intelligible (e.g. Thai and Lao). Tai speakers are thought to have dispersed west and southwest from the China–Vietnam borderlands from around 100 bce, a period that overlapped with the extension of Chinese rule through the Red River basin. We can date the beginning of this process from the common Tai word for the Vietnamese /k w/ from the name of a Chinese garrison Jiaozhi, established in Vietnam in about 112 bce. Significantly, southern minorities living under Chinese rule had to take family names around 300 ce, but Tais outside of China had no such practice until recent times.

Tai communities became established through northern Laos and Yunnan, and tradition holds that they settled the Shan hills (eastern Myanmar/Burma) in 569 ce, although the real date was probably somewhat later. Through the 7th to 13th centuries, Tais settled and eventually came to control the previously Mon- and Khmer-dominated territories corresponding largely to contemporary Thailand and much of Laos. The Siamese (Siam, Shan, and Ahom are all variants of the same Tai ethnonym) took Sukhothai from Mon hands in 1239 and by 1257 dominated the entire Upper Chao Phraya valley. In 1262 the rival Siamese kingdom of Lana established its capital at Chiangrai, and by the 1290s had subsumed the northern Mon state of Haripunchai centred at Lamphun. The 1200s also saw Tais migrating westward from the Shan Hills,


some reaching Assam, and tradition holds that the Tai Ahom founded their Assamese kingdom in 1228.

Tibeto-Burman

More than 300 Tibeto-Burman (TB) languages are spoken by over 30 million people in a pattern that radiates south and east from the Himalayas and Sichuan along the great river valleys of Asia (Van Driem 2001; see also chapter 25). The history of this family is becoming well understood, thanks to long-term efforts such as the Sino-

Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus (STEDT) project, and there are now well-developed theories about its origin and spread. TB is the second great wedge that divided Austroasiatic, pushing down through what is today Myanmar/Burma, limiting Austroasiatic speakers to a pocket of Mon in the south and scattered Palaungic com-munities in the Shan Hills.

The emerging picture places the TB homeland in Sichuan (or perhaps Yunnan), with very ancient westward and eastward migrations into the Himalayas and China respectively. But later movement was also important, and by 1000 bce the Southern-TB speakers, proto-Karenic and proto-Lolo-Burmese, had separated and begun to migrate deeper into MSEA. The Karens came down the Salween corridor and became estab-lished in what is now the Karen State and down into the isthmus of Kra. The Lolo-Burmese (LB) remained and diversified largely in Yunnan and northern Myanmar, spreading south in more gradual and staged migrations.

One LB group, the Pyu, establish a remarkable Buddhist civilization between the 4th and 9th centuries ce in the upper dry zone of the Irrawaddy basin, on an important overland route between India and China. From the 8th century the Nanzhao kingdom of Yunnan (variously claimed to be predominantly Tai or TB) began raiding its neigh-bors, one result being the movement of the Burmese out of Yunnan and into the ter-ritory of the Pyu. Pyu inscriptions strangely ceased for 200 years from the mid-9th century; by the time they resumed the Burmese were well entrenched among the Pyu and completed their conquest of the plains in the early 13th century. Lower Burma remained in the hands of Mon speakers well into historical times, but finally lost out to the Burmese, partly because the British favored the latter. Today, only a small Mon state survives within Myanmar/Burma. These days, many small Burmish and Loloish groups still live in Yunnan, and over the past millennium many have trickled into the Shan Hills, northern Laos, and Thailand. Well-known groups include the Akha, Lahu, Mpi, and others that are viewed as “hill tribes” on contemporary tourist trails.

Austroasiatic

The Austroasiatic languages, with a dozen branches, are spoken by some 100 million people spread in a great arc from Indo-China and the Malay peninsula, through the higher reaches of the Mekong and Salween rivers, to eastern and central India. Aside from the speakers of the Cambodian and Vietnamese national languages, Austroasiatic


communities are mostly found in the highlands and/or on the margins of mainstream societies now dominated by Daic, Tibeto-Burman, Austronesian, and Indo-European speaking peoples. This distribution, and the great internal diversity of Austroasiatic, suggest that it is the oldest language family of the region, at least four thousand years old.

Comparative studies of Austroasiatic have been conducted for more than a century, so that there are well-developed historical models for most branches and one extensive preliminary reconstruction for the phylum (Shorto 2006). There is no general scholarly consensus about the homeland or migration paths of the ancient Austroasiatics, but there are three broad scenarios. These include a western origin in northeastern India or in the vicinity of the Bay of Bengal (Van Driem 2001); a northern origin in central or southern China (Scheussler 2007); and a central origin within Southeast Asia (Sidwell 2010).

The main problem, from a comparative perspective, is that there are precious few indications of nested sub-branching within the family. The sound system and lexicon of each Austroasiatic branch can be largely explained by direct development from proto-Austroasiatic, but with few exceptions we lack direct indications that such branches were ever spoken beyond the zones they currently occupy. Consequently, we are left to imagine how the languages could have entered their current locations. Shorto (1979: 278), writing three decades ago, speculated:

The Northern Mon-Khmers and Khasis are likely to have followed what became a Chinese trade route to India, as the Mundas may well have done before them. But there seems no overriding reason to trace routes for the Mons and Khmers, and other groups who occupied the river-plains, down the rivers from the hinterland rather than up them from the coast.

However, the Nicobarese, Khasi, and Munda speakers are the most isolated from the rest of Austroasiatic, so we can perhaps say something about their geographical histo-ries. Firstly, the Nicobarese languages unquestionably reflect a prehistoric migration from the mainland. Grierson (1906: 15) quotes one Sir Richard Temple: “The Nico-barese have been on the same ground for at least 2000 years, and they have a tradition of a migration from the Pegu-Tenasserim Coast.” Linguistically, suggestions have been made that Nicobarese and the Aslian languages of Malaysia share some unique pho-netic developments (Diffloth 1977, 1991), but they are difficult to assess because of a lack of comparative work on these groups.

The Khasi inhabit the plateaux around Shillong in Meghalaya State (India) and are surrounded by Tibeto-Burman populations. Scholars have wondered if they represent some kind of link between the Munda of India and Mon-Khmer of Southeast Asia, although recent lexical studies indicate that Khasi is a sister group to the Palaungic languages of the Shan state in Myanmar/Burma. Consequently it is likely that the Khasis represent a migration, as Shorto speculated, possibly sometime in the first mil-lennium bce.

The Munda problem is much more difficult. Conventional wisdom since Pinnow (1959, 1960) has held that the dozen or so Munda languages of central and eastern India form one of two coordinate branches of Austroasiatic, the other comprising all


of the 150 or so Mon-Khmer languages. Pinnow and his followers asserted that the typological complexity of Munda was closest to Proto-Austroasiatic, and by implica-tion they represented the population who stayed more or less in the homeland, while the Mon-Khmers made one or more great migrations eastward in prehistory. More recently, a view has been gaining support that Munda is typologically innovative and Mon-Khmer languages resemble each other typologically because they have retained older features (Donegan & Stampe 2004). From this perspective one need only posit a single pre-Munda migration out of MSEA into India, perhaps four thousand years ago, and perhaps using the same route as that taken later by the Khasis and in the 13th century by the Assamese Tai (Ahom).

The last great movement of Austroasiatic speakers is seen in the success of the Vietnamese, who constitute maybe 80 percent of all Austroasiatic speakers today. During the millennium of Chinese rule until 938 ce, one of the small Muong languages spoken in the Red River valley became greatly influenced by Chinese and rose to become the vernacular of the newly independent civilization. From the 10th century, Vietnamese expanded southwards to displace Chamic, Khmer, and numerous small tribal languages to as far as the Mekong delta. Many southern Khmers (or Khmer Krom) still live in the delta region, but Vietnamese is rapidly advancing. Since 1975 the Vietnam highlands have also been undergoing a linguistic transformation, thanks to a massive organized transmigration from the north, as incoming Vietnamese dis-place and outnumber the Montagnard populations.

Conclusion

The ethnolinguistic mosaic of MSEA is far from random. Rather, it reveals a great deal about the history of movement of peoples, with complex and conflicting stories of growth and loss, of diversity and homogeneity. Fragmented hill-dwelling communities resulted from various processes. For instance, the Nyahkur of central Thailand are the isolated remnants of the 1st-millennium ce Mon kingdom of Dvaravati, left in situ after the mass Mon migrations to Myanmar/Burma. On the contrary, the many pockets of Hmong-Mien speakers in Thailand today are mostly refugees from Qing dynasty China. The largely homogenous lowland populations of Thais and Burmese represent intrusive ethnic groups, relative latecomers who conquered and assimilated earlier societies. Conversely, Cambodian speakers mostly reflect the growth of one local indig-enous group who succeeded in building a great civilization at Angkor that absorbed foreign influences without significant immigration.

Historically, the underlying pattern of peoples and languages probably owes most to two factors, the emergence and spread of populations who cultivated rice, and the growth of Chinese political power. The first factor allowed the Austroasiatics to grow and spread over a vast area in prehistory. Later, speakers of other languages, variously moving south to avoid conflict or simply seeking the high-yielding lowlands for them-selves, variously displaced and absorbed many of the Austroasiatic speakers, who are now frequently confined to the hills. Other latecomers, such as many Lolo-Burmese speakers, reached the hills of MSEA but were unable to penetrate the lowlands.


SEE ALSO: 25 Eastern Asia: Sino-Tibetan linguistic history; 34 Southeast Asian mainland: archaeology; 35 Southeast Asian islands and Oceania: Austronesian linguistic history

References and further reading

Diffloth, G. (1977) Mon-Khmer initial palatals and “subtratumized” Austro-Thai. Mon-Khmer

Studies Journal 6, 39–57.Diffloth, G. (1991) Palaungic vowels in Mon-Khmer perspective. In J. H. C. S. Davidson, Aus-

troasiatic Languages: Essays in Honor of H. L. Shorto. London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, pp. 13–28.

Donegan, P. J. & Stampe, D. (2004) Rhythm and the synthetic drift of Mun!d!ā. In R. Singh (ed.), The

Yearbook of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 2004. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 3–36.Edmondson, J. A. & Jinfang, L. (1996) The language corridor. In The Fourth International Sym-

posium on Language and Linguistics, Thailand. Salaya: Institute of Language and Culture for Rural Development, Mahidol University, pp. 983–990.

Grierson, G. A. (1906) Munda and Dravidian Families, vol. IV: Linguistic Survey of India. Delhi: Banarashidas.

Larish, M. D. (1999) The position of Moken and Moklen in the Austronesian language family. PhD dissertation, University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Lebar, F., Hickey, G., & Musgrave, J. (1964) Ethnic Groups of Mainland Southeast Asia. New Haven: HRAF Press.

L-Thongkum, T. (1993) A view on Proto-Mjuenic (Yao). Mon-Khmer Studies 22, 163–230.Pinnow, H.-J. (1959) Versuch Einer Historischen Lautlehre der Kharia-Sprache [An attempt at a

historical phonology of the Kharia language]. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.Pinnow, H.-J. (1960) Über den Ursprung der voneinander abweichenden Strukturen der Munda

und Khmer-Nicobar Sprachen [On the origin of the divergent structures of the Munda and Khmer-Nicobar languages]. Indo-Iranian Journal 4(1), 81–103.

Purnell, H. C., Jr. (1970) Toward a reconstruction of Proto-Miao-Yao. PhD dissertation, Cornell University.

Ratliff, M. (2010) Hmong-Mien Language History. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.Savina, F. M. (1924) Histoire des Miao [History of the Miao]. Paris: Société des

Missions-Etrangères.Schuessler, A. (2007) ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Honolulu: University of

Hawaii Press.Shorto, H. L. (1979) The linguistic proto-history of mainland South East Asia. In R. B. Smith &

W. Watson (eds.), Early South East Asia. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 273–278.Shorto, H. L. (2006) A Mon-Khmer Comparative Dictionary. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics 579.Sidwell, P. (2005) Acehnese and the Aceh-Chamic language family. In A. Grant & P. Sidwell

(eds.), Chamic and Beyond: Studies in Mainland Austronesian Languages. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics 569, pp. 211–246.

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Contact and Change. Oceanic Linguistics special publications 28. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.


Van Driem, G. (2001) Languages of the Himalayas: An Ethnolinguistic Handbook of the

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proto-Miao-Yao]. Beijing: China Social Sciences Press.

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