A History of Assam c7.s1.11

c7.s1.11

The non-Aryan languages still spoken by people of the Dravidian physical type belong to two entirely distinct families of speech—the Dravidian and the Mundā. Languages of the former family are spoken throughout Southern India and also by certain tribes of Chota Nagpur and the adjacent uplands. Other tribes in the latter area speak Mundā languages. There are traces of the former existence of allied languages in the Punjab hills, but there are no indications whatever of their ever having been spoken in Southern India. The Dravidian linguistic family has no known affinity with any languages spoken outside India. Nor, with the exception of a small tribe in Baluchistan,* is it spoken by any people who are not Dravidians by race. The Mundā family, on the other hand, is allied to the Khāsi of Assam and the Mon-Khmer languages of Burma, and belongs like them to the Austro-Asiatic family: this again is a branch of the most widely diffused linguistic family in the world—the Austric—dialects of which are spoken in many parts of South-East Asia and in islands of the Indian and Pacific oceans as far as Easter Island off the coast of South America. Though there are many exceptions, the majority of the speakers of this widespread linguistic family are Mongolian by race, and recent research points to the coast of Indo-China as the place where it probably originated.