Austro-Asiatic Languages have three subfamilies: Munda (spoken in Eastern India); Nicobarese (spoken in the Nicobar Islands); Mon-Khmer (spoken in Southeast Asia).
The Munda languages are polysyllabic and differ from other Austro-Asiatic languages in their word formation and sentence structure.
In the Mon-Khmer subfamily, Khmer and Mon have many borrowings from the Indian languages Sanskrit and Pali. Vietnamese (in the Viet-Muong branch of Mon-Khmer) was heavily influenced by Chinese; it is monosyllabic and has a complex tone system, as do other Viet-Muong languages. A few other Mon-Khmer languages have simple tone systems; much more common, however, are differentiations of vowel quality-breathy, creaky, or normal.
Suffixes are not found in Mon-Khmer languages, but prefixes
and infixes are common. The final part of sentences may contain
special modifiers called expressives which are used to convey
images of colors, noises, and feelings. Some languages lack
voiced stops such as g, d, and b. Words may
end with palatized consonants such as n. Other distinctive
sounds include d and b sounds, produced by suction
of breath.
Mon-Khmer
- Vietnamese , Khmer (Cambodian), Mon and various minority and tribal languages of Southeast Asia
Munda
- tribal languages of Eastern India
[Articles/_private/langnavbar.htm]Nicobarese
- spoken in the Nicobar Islands of India