Seminar Series: Abstract

15.30
April 24 2009
Seminar Room C

'The Austroasiatic Central Riverine Hypothesis'
Paul Sidwell, Linguistics RSPAS

Recent attention has focused on the question of localizing the Austroasiatic homeland, especially interdisciplinary inquiries seeking correlations between linguistics, genetics, and archaeology. Among the various suggestions that have been offered over the years, one can distinguish three essential ideas:
1. a western origin, in northern India or in the vicinity of the Bay of Bengal
2. a northern origin, in central or southern China, and
3. a central origin, within Southeast Asia.


The first of these was advanced on the basis that Munda languages are morphologically archaic; the second view has found support in supposed Austroasiatic loans into Old Chinese; while the third is mostly a centre-of-gravity argument that finds no bases for locating the ancestors of the Mons, Khmers and others outside of their known historical locations. In recent conference presentations Gerard Diffloth has argued that the Austroasiatic lexicon rules out a temperate zone (i.e. China) origin in favour of a tropical homeland, which would narrow the possibilities to 1. or 3. above. But how can one build further on this insight? I argue that the comparative analysis of lexicon and phonology suggests a flat or rake-like family tree, consistent with an ancient dialect chain strung out along a distinct geographical corridor. The mainland of Southeast Asia offers just such corridors in the form of north-south running river valleys, especially the Mekong, Chao Phraya and the Irrawaddy. A parsimonious analysis of possible migration routes out of such a homeland suggests a zone centred on the middle Mekong, in the lowlands of northeast Thailand and southern Laos. Such a model anticipates that the ancient Austroasiatics were basically a riverine society that first spread along waterways, adapting secondarily to upland environments, particularly those who moved north and west.