Documentation and analysis of seven Munda languages and development of the Munda Virtual Archive

FAIN: PD-281083-21

Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages (Salem, OR 97302-1902)
Gregory David Shelton Anderson (Project Director: February 2021 to present)
Mark Donohue (Co Project Director: May 2021 to present)

The documentation through data collection and analysis, and development of grammars, for seven endangered Munda languages, spoken in northeast India and Bangladesh.  All data would be made available online through the Munda Virtual Archive and would be archived at the Workspace for Austroasiatic Intangible Heritage (RWAAI) at Lund University, Sweden.

(Edited by staff) This project proposes comprehensive documentation of seven Munda languages – Gorum, Gta’, Juang, Kharia, Mundari, Remo, and Santali – spoken in northeast India and Bangladesh. Munda languages constitute the westernmost, and typologically most divergent, subgroup of the Austroasiatic language family.  There are at least twelve Munda languages, spoken in the area of northern India and Bangladesh, ranging in speaker population from those with a few million speakers (Santali) to those with under 10,000 (most languages of southern Odisha).  The structures of Munda languages make them very distinct from their sister languages spoken in Mainland Southeast Asia. Contemporary researchers of the Munda language family acknowledge that we have an incomplete picture of even the basic analytic units of the prosodic and phonological systems of even some of the best documented Munda languages. Even today, the quality of the data available to base generalizations upon is lacking for most Munda languages. Besides providing a fundamental and systematic documentation of these seriously endangered languages, we will use the data we gather to advance typological and historical research on the Munda and Austroasiatic language families. We will develop the Munda Virtual Archive, which will offer access to comparative linguistic data on the seven targeted languages. Data would be archived at the Repository and Workspace for Austroasiatic Indigenous Heritage (RWAAI) at the University of Lund, Sweden.

Associated Products

Towards a typology of contact-driven morphosyntactic restructuring in Munda languages (Book Section)
Title: Towards a typology of contact-driven morphosyntactic restructuring in Munda languages
Author: Gregory D. S. Anderson and Bikram Jora
Editor: Gregory D. S. Anderson
Abstract: Munda languages have undergone contact-driven changes in their structure at multiple times during their history in South Asia, not just a single parametric shift in rhythm subsequently triggering a cascading typological restructuring as has been previously claimed. Moreover, some changes are pattern copies or calques and others are form copies or borrowings. Some changes found in Munda languages from their original state occurred very early at the proto-Munda stage, and are reflected in the structure of all attested modern Munda languages, e.g. the shift to SOV syntax. What language(s) proto-Munda may have been in contact with at this time is unknown. Other shifts reflect very clear later restructuring such as the reorganization of the verb template in proto-Gutob-Remo, and likely reflects a pattern copy of a Dravidian structure. Still other pattern copies are quite recent, such as the shift to subject marking on preverbal negators in Kharia that likely occurred under influence from Mundari. Form copies in morphosyntax are also found in various Munda languages, such as the borrowing of an objective case marker of likely Indo-Aryan origin attested in several languages, but each one separately and individually reflecting a distinct source language and contact milieu.
Year: 2022
Access Model: No
Publisher: Deccan College. Pune, India
Book Title: Munda Linguistics: Typological, Descriptive and Diachronic Perspectives
ISBN: 97881958873554

Some atypical features associated with negative forms in the Munda languages (Book Section)
Title: Some atypical features associated with negative forms in the Munda languages
Author: Gregory D. S. Anderson and Bikram Jora
Editor: Gregory D. S. Anderson
Abstract: Munda languages show complex systems of negative polarity items interacting with argument indices, tense-aspect-mood (TAM) markers and indices of transitivity, voice and valence. Two formal series of negation are found across the Kherwarian subgroup, one a general negator, one encoding prohibitive. Both the default negator and the prohibitive appear before the verbal complex in attested Kherwarian languages, and both typically serve as the host for subject clitics, but there is micro-variation noted among Kherwarian languages in the indexing of verbal actants that are dependent on both TAM marking and negation. One such oddity is that actant encoding is more likely in negative formations than in positive ones such as with animate non-human or inanimate subjects. Certain other typologically unusual features characterize the modern systems (as well as indeed proto-Kherwarian in some instances), in particular a mismatch between the encoding of possessa as subjects in negative past copula forms but as objects in negative present ones.
Year: 2022
Access Model: No
Publisher: Deccan College. Pune India
Book Title: Munda Linguistics: Typological, Descriptive and Diachronic Perspectives.
ISBN: 9788195887354

“If you eat beef, you cannot learn”: An exploration of tribal identity, internal neocolonialism, “development” and contact effects on the languages of two “primitive” or “particularly vulnerable tribal groups” who are speakers of Munda languages (Book Section)
Title: “If you eat beef, you cannot learn”: An exploration of tribal identity, internal neocolonialism, “development” and contact effects on the languages of two “primitive” or “particularly vulnerable tribal groups” who are speakers of Munda languages
Author: Gregory D. S. Anderson and Bikram Jora
Editor: Gregory D. S. Anderson
Abstract: The Indian national and local state policies of ‘development’ have had profound linguistic, sociocultural and demographic effects on so-called ‘primitive tribal’ communities, who occupy the very lowest rung in the complex social hierarchy that defines the post-independence modern Indian nation-state. Popular belief expressed by the majority dominant Hindu and Indo-Aryan population asserts the advance of a ‘postcolonial’ contemporary India. Certain ‘primitive tribal’ communities in no sense share in the postcolonial experience, and indeed have suffered in many ways more under the internal neo-colonialist development schemes enforced on them by the ‘postcolonial’ Indian state regime than anything during the time of the British Raj. State efforts at 'development' for 'particularly vulnerable tribal' groups' is an orchestrated move by State agencies to i) Hindu-ize their population religiously and socially, ii) force foreign agricultural and animal husbandry practices on them economically, iii) destroy their traditional livelihood opportunities and iv) Aryanize them linguistically. We discuss here the concepts of 'tribal' in modern India with respect to two ‘primitive (or particularly vulnerable) tribal’ language communities belonging to the Munda (Austroasiatic) language family, Birhoɽ and Gtaʔ and how their own understanding of the goals that 'development' efforts perpetrated by internal neocolonialist State agent have made i)-iv) approaching realities and how these efforts might still be averted.
Year: 2022
Access Model: Not open access
Publisher: Deccan College. Pune: India.
Book Title: Munda Linguistics: Typological, Descriptive and Diachronic Perspectives.
ISBN: 9788195887354

A Preliminary Phonetic Analysis of Prominence in Assam Santali Disyllables (Book Section)
Title: A Preliminary Phonetic Analysis of Prominence in Assam Santali Disyllables
Author: Luke Horo and Gregory D. S. Anderson
Editor: Gregory D. S. Anderson
Abstract: Assam Santali shows a system of second syllable prominence regardless of the syllabic shape in non-derived and uninflected disyllabic words. Prominence is cued by a conspiracy of duration, intensity and fundamental frequency. This system of prominence assignment in Assam Santali disyllables is true regardless of the utterance context: whether the word in pronounced in isolation, in a quasi-focal position in a phrasal/sentence frame or in an explicitly out-of-focus sentential frame. While the syllable structure plays no role in determining that the second syllable is treated as prominent with respect to the first syllable in our data set, the specific segmental environment appears to have limited interaction. Duration is the most consistent cue of prominence in our data and appears to be exceptionless in this function in all instances, regardless of syllable structure, the utterance context or the segmental environment. Intensity is largely the same but shows some limited differences with words containing only high vowels and with certain onset consonants. Fundamental frequency does not appear to cue words in when uttered in isolation, and also shows limited effect of fricative and affricate onset consonants but shows no sensitivity to syllable structure.
Year: 2022
Publisher: Deccan College. Pune: India.
Book Title: Munda Linguistics: Typological, Descriptive and Diachronic Perspectives
ISBN: 9788195887354

Pluractional in Gtaʔ (Book Section)
Title: Pluractional in Gtaʔ
Author: Gregory D. S. Anderson
Editor: Gregory D. S. Anderson
Abstract: The marker -har- is an element in the Munda language Gtaʔ (Gtaʔsa) that previously has been considered a third plural subject marker, but its distributional range and functions suggest that it shiould rather be analyzed as a pluractional marker. The pluractional in Gtaʔ can occur in all of the typical subject contexts associated with pluractionals cross-linguistically, in Chadic languages like Bole (Gimba 2000, 2001): that is, several subjects acting one by one, several subject acting iteratively on the same object, subject subjects acting iteratively on several objects, one subject acting on several objects, one subject repeatedly doing the same action. However, some features of Gtaʔ pluractional marking are more noteworthy from a typological perspective. Thus, the pluractional marker in Gtaʔ is affixal but not obligatory as such insofar as it does not always occur when one might expect it and speakers will accept sentences without it as grammatical; it occurs in its own templatic slot in the verb template after the Aspect and Aktionsart categories and before the finite/non-finite mood marker; it can occur with numerals; it can occur with plural and dual marked subjects NPs; it occurs with verbs of motion commonly; it occurs with verbs of speaking and mental action most commonly; it often occurs at the end and beginning of narratives; it can occur sentence initially in a non-finite forms in tail-head linkage structures; it can occur with serialized verbs; and it is used in combination with ‘live’ as a conventionalized story ending.
Year: 2022
Publisher: Deccan College. Pune: India.
Book Title: Munda Linguistics: Typological, Descriptive and Diachronic Perspectives
ISBN: 9788195887354

Towards a typology of focus and information structure in the Munda languages (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Towards a typology of focus and information structure in the Munda languages
Author: Luke Horo
Author: Gregory D. S. Anderson
Abstract: A comparative study of the morphological, syntactic and prosodic means of encoding focus in Mundari and Sora, two distantly related languages of the Munda language family
Date: 10/26/2023
Conference Name: International Conference on Austroasiatic Linguistics

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