Munda languages

The Munda languages are a group of closely-related languages spoken by about eleven million people in India, Bangladesh and Nepal. Historically, they have been called the Kolarian languages. They constitute a branch of the Austroasiatic language family, which means they are distantly related to languages such as the Mon and Khmer languages, to Vietnamese, as well as to minority languages in Thailand and Laos and the minority Mangic languages of South China. Bhumij, Ho, Mundari, and Santali are notable Munda languages. The family is generally divided into two branches: North Munda, spoken in the Chota Nagpur Plateau of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Odisha and West Bengal, as well as in parts of Bangladesh and Nepal, and South Munda, spoken in central Odisha and along the border between Andhra Pradesh and Odisha. North Munda, of which Santali is the most widely spoken and recognised as an official language in India, has twice as many speakers as South Munda. After Santali, the Mundari and Ho languages rank next in number of speakers, followed by Korku and Sora. The remaining Munda languages are spoken by small isolated groups and are poorly described. General characteristics of the Munda languages include head-final clausal structure, the fusion of middle voice and active voice with tense-aspect-mood markers, a distinction between inclusive and exclusive first-person plural pronouns in the pronominal systems, the lack of grammatical gender as a productive category, the widespread use of numeral classifiers, and lexical words in referential function ("nouns") all have one invariable form, a distinction between alienable and inalienable possession, and rich and pervasive systems of auxiliary verb constructions (AVCs) in clausal structure. The Munda languages are generally synthetic and agglutinating. In Munda sound systems, consonant sequences are infrequent except in the middle of words. The Munda languages are often interpreted as prime examples...