More on Munda Languages Project and the Munda Languages

The output of the Munda Languages project will include the digitization of existing legacy materials, a searchable cross-language database of the Munda languages that will serve as the basis for all future linguistic research on this poorly known family of languages, as well as a searchable database of annotated audio/video materials on the languages (using ELAN as the basis of the annotations).

Note that only rough estimates are available for numbers of speakers of many of the endangered languages and smaller Munda-speaking populations. This is due largely to the fact that the Indian census does not list language/ethnic groups numbering under 10,000 persons. Also there is considerable confusion of language and ethnic group names as well.

The Munda Languages project has three basic facets: documentation and archiving of endangered language materials, digitization and annotation of legacy materials dating back 45 years and the compilation of a web-accessible database of typological features of Munda languages.

Documentation
The documentation project begins with the video and audio recording of speakers of various ages, levels of competency and dialects from the endangered languages listed above. Annotations will minimally have four (or five) tiers: one rendering the Munda language in IPA transcription, one tier of interlinearized glossing using the Leipzig glossing conventions, an English translation and a translation into Oriya and/or Hindi, whichever is appropriate (or in the case of the widespread and disparate Turi, both).

The digitization is to be carried out in conjunction with, and the archiving of the data from the project will be housed in, ELAR, at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, with a mirror site housed on a server at the local host institution, Department of Tribal Languages, University of Ranchi, Jharkhand State, India. Dr. Ganesh Murmu is our local contact.

Digitization of legacy materials
A number of legacy materials in different media need to be digitized and annotated to supplement the field data. These legacy materials are in a variety of formats, ranging from analog recordings dating back 40-45 years, unpublished text collections and lexical lists, including the massive Munda comparative lexical materials described below.

Typological Database
The annotated sessions of the endangered Munda languages are being entered into a searchable, web-accessible relational database, linked to audio/video files and text-type annotations according to a number of typological features, viz. vocalic (including suprasegmental) and consonantal features, features of nominal and verbal morphosyntax inflectional and derivational categories, auxiliary structures, etc.), as well as characteristics of simplex and complex clause structure. Entries consist of values and commentary discussion, time-linked to video and audio examples whenever possible.

This typological database of Munda languages when completed will ultimately serve as a complement to the large comparative Munda lexical database already under way (see below)

Additional Information on the Munda Languages
The Munda language family of eastern and central India represents one of the most fascinating and theoretically stimulating language families on the planet. Unfortunately, very little primary data on the roughly 20-odd members of the Munda language family are widely known or even available to the world wide linguistic community. This is in part due to the fact that for some languages, the data is quite out of date and for others, the only materials that exist are unpublished, or in hard to find sources and/or in languages that are not widely known by the linguistic community at large.

• Where are the Munda languages spoken and how long have they been there?

• How many people speak these languages?

• Who are the Munda-speaking people?

• What are Munda languages like?

• What kind of documentation is there of Munda languages?

• What languages are Munda-speaking people shifting to?

Where are the Munda languages spoken and how long have they been there?

Although probably immigrants from the east (where most of their sister languages in the broad Austroasiatic phylum remain today) the Munda peoples appear to be the tribal autochthons of eastern India, their ancestors having already occupied their current domains of inhabitance at a time significantly predating the arrival of Aryan- and Dravidian- speaking populations of the region. This is codified in the standard designation applied to all Munda-speaking peoples (and strictly speaking to certain non-Munda peoples as well) adivasi ‘first’.

Currently Munda-speaking peoples are found in large concentrations in the Indian states of Orissa, Jharkhand, and Madhya Pradesh, with further communities in adjacent parts of the states of Chhatisgarh, Bihar, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, and Maharashtra, and even further a field in Bangladesh and Nepal.

How many people speak these languages?

Of the roughly two dozen or so Munda languages still spoken, at least one quarter (if not more) appear to exhibit some degree of language endangerment, ranging from moribund (Gorum) to severely endangered with a few hundred (Koda/Kora) or a few thousand speakers (Hill and Plains Gta?, Remo, Turi; also Bijori, Agariya, Bhumij, Korwa and Mahali not covered in the present proposal); for at least one endangered Munda language, Koraku, no data is available as it is conflated in census statistics with Korwa or previously Korku. The non-endangered but threatened languages have in the tens to hundreds of thousands speakers still (Juang, Kharia, Sora, Gutob, Birhor, Bhumij) while stable languages often number a million (Mundari) or several million (Santali).

Turi has maybe 4,000 Kherwarian Munda speakers scattered throughout various districts of Jharkhand, West Bengal, Chhatisgarh, Orissa and Madhya Pradesh. For certain groups, what little information there is often conflicts with other such reports, e.g. KodÚa (Kora) appears to have but 1-2% language retention among the heavily Aryanized (Bengali) or Dravidianized (Kurux) population of 31,000 according to Parkin (1991: 24), i.e. yielding under 500 total speakers), but has been reported to have as many as 7-25,000 in other sources–a number that assuredly reflects ethno-linguistic identity rather than linguistic competence per se (a stated policy of the Indian census).

What languages are Munda-speaking people speaking instead of their ancestral tongue?

While many Munda-speaking peoples also command one or more Indo-Aryan or Dravidian language fluently (e.g. Bengali, Hindi, Chhatisgarhi, Desia Oriya, Sadani/Sad[a]ri, Marathi, Kurukh, Telugu), the rates of ancestral ‘mother tongue’ preservation among the youngest generation, as well as the sociolinguistic dynamics and contexts of its use in the actual Munda-speaking communities are generally lacking, even in the most recent such sources (e.g. the LSI Orissa 2002 volume; Ishtiaq (1999); Itagi and Singh (ed.) (2002)).

Who are the Munda-speaking people?
Munda peoples practice a range of traditional indigenous religions sometimes mixed with locally appropriate quasi-Hindu practices (as well as Christianity in some areas), venerating stone megaliths built by their ancestors, maintaining sacred groves, and in places still practicing an ancient water-buffalo ritual sacrifice.
Over the past centuries, some Munda-speaking peoples have been largely discriminated against in India as meat-eating non-Hindus (and non-Muslims). In terms of traditional economy, Munda-speaking peoples mainly practice[d] nomadic hunter-gatherer foraging and/or subsistence agriculture. In recent times, an urban population has developed, notably in Ranchi, the capital of the newly constituted Munda-dominant state of Jharkhand.

What are Munda languages like?

Although poorly known, what little is known about the Munda languages seem to have great relevance to several unrelated fields of inquiry in comparative linguistics, as well as to the prehistory of the Indian Subcontinent. These include general theoretical and typological linguistic studies, South Asian areal studies, and the history of the Austroasiatic language family more widely.

In general, Munda languages appear to exhibit a typological profile that is very different from that which is typical of the Mon Khmer languages to which they are related (cf. Donegan and Stampe 1983; Donegan 1993), but these differences are not always attributable to Dravidian and/or Indo-Aryan influence. For example, the verb structure of the North Munda languages is extremely synthetic, indeed significantly more synthetic than structures typical of either Dravidian or Indo-Aryan languages. In this way, they share certain structural affinities with so-called ‘pronominalized’ Tibeto-Burman languages, with which they may have formed an earlier areal group, prior to the intrusion of Dravidian- and Indo-Aryan speaking populations.
A better understanding of the nature and origin of the Munda languages will help elucidate the complex issues surrounding the nature and degree of synthesis characteristic of the ancestral Proto-Austroasiatic [PAA] language as well as the original clausal syntax and system of nominal categorization and inflection found in PAA.
 

With regards to verbal and syntactic phenomena characteristic of Munda languages (insofar as these can be gleaned from the attested sources) there appear to be systems of noun incorporation patterns that are highly marked or even unique: double argument and even agent argument noun incorporation in Sora.

Another characteristic of the verbal systems of particular Munda languages that are rare or unique among the world’s languages is the agreement of a verb with both an argument and a logical possessor of that argument (rather than a kind of ‘possessor raising’ where the possessor of the argument is preferentially encoded as the argument itself–a system found in numerous languages worldwide) that is attested in Santali (Neukom 1999) and Santali-like Kherwarian North Munda varieties, e.g. the Turi language covered in this proposal, which has been reported to be a Santalized Mundari-like speech variety. For more see Anderson (2007).

Several Munda languages are reported to have contrastive creaky voice and/or low pitch, laryngealization or other voice register phenomena.

What kind of documentation is there of Munda languages?

The majority of the Munda languages could be considered poorly documented, including some of the larger and non-endangered ones (e.g. Ho, Sora, Korku). Even basic demographic information on certain of these groups is lacking. Despite the existence of some Munda language materials in the (1904) Linguistic Survey of India [LSI], these are far from satisfactory. As Emeneau put it in his 1955 work (cited in Mahapatra et al. [eds.] 2002)
"[o]n the Munda languages little need to be said. They have so far either been badly described or known only as names in the Survey, which certainly did not succeed in mapping them all." Many of the Munda varieties represented in the LSI are simply translations of the prodigal son tale from the Bible.

Selected Publications on Munda languages

The Munda Online Comparative Dictionary
The Munda lexical database project has been underway for several years and in its current draft form holds roughly 50,000 entries from 12 languages. It was begun by Dr. Manideepa Patnaik in 1999 and joined by Dr. Gregory Anderson the following year. It currently exists in Word and Excel formats, but there are not yet any associated sound files (although many have been recorded for example for Ho and Sora, to a lesser extent Remo as well), and insufficient metadata.

This database will include not only the attested forms, but for a number of entries, intermediate proto-language forms and where possible, Proto-Munda forms are being added as well (based on currently ongoing research), thus furthering its use to researchers in other historical or social scientific disciplines dealing with India. Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages is currently engaged in the process of collecting sound and other media files to populate this resource.

Sample Entry From Munda Comparative Lexicon
 

Talking Comparative Dictionary Samples

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Ho Lexical Samples		Sora Lexical Samples
Eye	Goat	Dog	Elephant #1
Swollen	New Moon	Goat	Elephant #2
Remo Lexical Samples		Frog	Pig
Eye	Tongue	Mango	Snake #2
Nose	Leg	Snake #1	Tiger
		Snake #3	Water Buffalo

Ho Warang Chiti Unicode initiative
Researchers from Living Tongues Institute have been working with representatives of both the Ho community of India as well as the Unicode Consortium to facilitate constructive dialogue between these groups on the proper encoding of the indigenous Warang Chiti (Varang Kshiti) script so that the Ho community may communicate over the Internet and have an Internet presence of their own design. Click here to see a draft of the preliminary report submitted.

Sample of Ho writing
 

Preliminary Report to Unicode