Glimpses of the Ethnolinguistic Prehistory of Northeastern India

The world's two most populous families of languages meet in the Himalayas. These are Tibeto-Burman, which includes Cantonese and Mandarin, and Indo-European, to which languages such as English and Bengali belong. In addition to these two great linguistic phyla, Kra-Dai alias Daic, Austroasiatic and Dravidian language communities skirt the eastern Himalayan region. For example, the Austroasiatic language Khasi is spoken in the Indian state of Meghalaya. Ahom, a now extinct Kra-Dai tongue, was once a prominent cultural language in northeastern India, where scattered Daic language communities are still settled today. The Dravidian tongues Dhangar and Jhangar, which are basically dialects of Kurukh or Uraon, are spoken in Nepal's eastern Terai. Kurukh is also spoken in scattered communities throughout northeastern India by people displaced by British colonial policies in India involving resettlement, not unlike the policy of transmigrasi in the former Dutch East Indies. Yet the Himalayas would appear to be peripheral to our understanding of the prehistory of Dravidian. The crux of the ethnolinguistic prehistory of the eastern Himalayan region are the language families Tibeto-Burman, Austroasiatic, Indo-European and, to a lesser extent, Kra-Dai.