The Austric language superfamily is a large grouping of languages primarily spoken in South East Asia and the Pacific. It includes the Austronesian language family of the Pacific and Madagascar, as well as the Austroasiatic language family of mainland South East Asia and South India. The hypothesis of a genetic relationship between these two language families is not widely accepted among linguists.

The Austric superfamily was first proposed by the German missionary Wilhelm Schmidt in 1906. He showed phonological, morphological, and lexical evidence to support the existence of an Austric superfamily, but the lexical evidence was not accepted by the larger linguistic community. Due to this shortcoming, the Austric hypothesis has never gained general acceptance. In 1942, Paul K. Benedict proposed an Austric super family which included not only the Austronesian and Austroasiatic languages, but also the Tai-Kadai languages, and the Hmong-Mien (Miao-Yao) languages. This extension is much more tenuous, and is almost universally rejected today.

Despite missing lexical evidence, the relationship between Austronesian and Austroasiatic languages has many proponents to this day. Some believe that recently discovered morphological similarities between Nicobarese and Austronesian languages prove a genetic relationship. Other researchers are still searching for the missing lexical link between Austronesian and Austroasiatic.

Relevant Papers

• Schmidt, Wilhelm.  1906.  Die Mon-Khmer-Völker, ein Bindeglied zwischen Völkern Zentralasiens und Austronesiens [The Mon-Khmer Peoples, a Link between the Peoples of Central Asia and Austronesia].  Archiv far Anthropologie, Braunschweig, new series, 5:59-109.
• Hayes, La Vaughn H.  1992. On the Track of Austric, Part I: Introduction.  Mon-Khmer Studies XXI:143-77.
• Diffloth, Gerard. 1994. The lexical evidence for Austric so far. Oceanic Linguistics 33(2):309-321.
• Reid, Lawrence A. 1994. Morphological evidence for Austric. Oceanic Linguistics 33(2):323-344.
• Reid, Lawrence A. 1996. The current state of linguistic research on the relatedness of the language families of East and Southeast Asia. In: Ian C. Glover and Peter Bellwood, editorial co-ordinators, Indo-Pacific Prehistory: The Chiang Mai Papers, Volume 2, pp . 87-91. Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association 15. Canberra: Australian National University.
• Hayes, La Vaughn H. 1997. On the Track of Austric, Part II: Consonant Mutation in Early Austroasiatic.  Mon-Khmer Studies XXVII:13-41.
• Hayes, La Vaughn H. 1999.  On the Track of Austric, Part III: Basic Vocabulary Correspondence.   Mon-Khmer Studies XXIX:1-34.

External Links

• Phonological links among Austronesian and Austroasiatic languages
• Glossary of purported lexical links among Austronesian and Austroasiatic languages