Southeast Asia

Organized Panel Session

(3) - The Khasian Languages of Northeast India: Between, but not wholly of, South and Southeast Asia

The usual linguistic and anthropological narrative of the Khasian languages spoken in Meghalaya in Northeast India is that they are the only remaining evidence of an Austroasiatic language whose speakers once covered most of the Northeast region. Over time, the story continues, incursive migrations of speakers of Indo-Aryan and Tibeto-Burman languages gradually absorbed and assimilated most of this speech community, leaving only the small pockets of Khasian speech found today.

To what extent do the Khasian languages and the cultural practices of the Khasi people support such a reading of the past? Indeed, the languages do bear traces of movements of speakers of various language families and trade goods along a northern land corridor joining the Indian Subcontinent with Southeast Asia. But the Khasian languages themselves do not simply read as palimpsests of new groups moving into the area. From a linguistic perspective, the languages align neither fully with the languages of South Asia, nor again with the languages of Southeast Asia. The Khasian languages throw into relief the limitations of the intellectual constructs of the South Asian and Southeast Asian “linguistic areas.”

Speaker(s)

• HR

  Hiram Ring

  University of Zurich, Switzerland