The forest remembers what the plains forgot, in words older than the names of rivers.
Origins & meaning
The Austroasiatic family is among the oldest linguistic inheritances on the Indian subcontinent, older by most reckonings than Sanskrit's arrival and older still than the Dravidian tongues that share the peninsula with it. The name itself is a scholarly compound — "Austro" from the Latin for south, "Asiatic" marking the continent — coined by linguists in the early twentieth century to describe a family that stretches from the Munda-speaking belts of eastern and central India across to Southeast Asia, where Khmer and Vietnamese belong to the same distant lineage. In India, the family survives chiefly through two branches: the Munda languages, spoken across Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, and West Bengal by communities such as the Santal, Ho, Mundari, and Kharia peoples, and the Khasi language of Meghalaya, which stands as the sole Mon-Khmer representative on Indian soil.
Philologists trace the roots of these languages to a proto-tongue spoken by communities who moved through the river valleys and forested plateaus of eastern India several millennia ago, long before the Indo-Aryan migrations reshaped the linguistic map. What survives is not merely vocabulary but a grammar of thought — Munda languages, for instance, retain agglutinative structures where verbs absorb tense, mood, and even social relationship into a single dense word, a feature linguists consider a fossil of remarkable antiquity. To speak Santali or Khasi today is to carry forward syntax that predates most of what is now considered ancient in Indian civilisation.
The tradition today
Santali, the most widely spoken Munda language, has achieved a status few tribal languages in India can claim: constitutional recognition under the Eighth Schedule, its own script called Ol Chiki devised by Pandit Raghunath Murmu in the mid-twentieth century, and a growing body of literature, cinema, and journalism. Universities in Jharkhand and West Bengal now offer degree programmes in Santali, and government schools in Santal-majority districts increasingly use it as a medium of early instruction, a hard-won concession after decades of linguistic marginalisation.
Khasi, by contrast, carries the distinction of being written in Roman script since the arrival of Welsh missionaries in the nineteenth century, a choice that has shaped its literary and liturgical life ever since. It remains the dominant language of everyday commerce, governance, and worship across much of Meghalaya, spoken with a confidence that few other Austroasiatic languages in India currently enjoy. Elsewhere, languages like Kharia, Juang, and Gtaʼ languages persist with far smaller speaker bases, sustained mostly through oral transmission in villages where formal schooling still arrives in Hindi, Odia, or Bengali, creating a quiet erosion that linguists have documented with increasing urgency.
Regional & family variations
Even within the Munda branch, the differences are substantial enough that a Ho speaker from Odisha and a Korku speaker from Madhya Pradesh would find little mutual intelligibility despite their shared ancestry. Mundari itself divides into dialects shaped by geography — the speech of the Ranchi plateau carries different tonal patterns and borrowed vocabulary than that spoken in the forests of Simdega or Gumla, where proximity to Oraon and Kurukh communities has left its mark.
Khasi, spoken across a smaller but topographically dramatic region, splits into recognisable regional forms: the War dialect of the southern slopes near Bangladesh differs from the Pnar spoken in Jaintia Hills, which itself carries enough distinction to be considered by some a separate language. Family naming conventions, too, vary along these lines — Khasi society's matrilineal structure means surnames pass through the mother's line, a practice with no parallel among the patrilineal Munda communities of central India, illustrating that Austroasiatic kinship extends only to grammar and vocabulary, never to social architecture, which each community has shaped according to its own history.
A note on rituals & symbols
Among Santal communities, language and ritual are inseparable during the Sohrai and Baha festivals, when invocations to Marang Buru, the mountain deity, are chanted in Santali verse forms that resist easy translation into Hindi or Bengali, their rhythm tied to the agricultural calendar and the flowering of the sal tree. The Ol Chiki script itself carries symbolic weight beyond literacy — its rounded, hand-drawn letterforms were designed by Pandit Murmu to reflect natural shapes, moons, birds, human postures, making the alphabet a small cosmology in itself.
In Khasi tradition, the spoken word carries ceremonial authority particularly in the Seng Khasi religious practice, where genealogies are recited aloud during clan gatherings, the names of maternal ancestors forming a spoken lineage that substitutes for written record. Betel nut and lime, offered and shared during negotiations or ceremonies, are accompanied by set phrases in Khasi that function almost as ritual punctuation, small verbal gestures that bind social transactions to linguistic tradition.
Preserving it for the next generation
Family archives have a particular responsibility toward Austroasiatic languages precisely because so much of their historical transmission has been oral rather than written. Recording grandparents singing Santali harvest songs, or asking an elder to narrate a Khasi clan genealogy in full, creates documentation that no state census or linguistic survey can fully replicate. Photographs of Ol Chiki primers, old mission-printed Khasi hymnals, or handwritten Mundari word-lists compiled by earlier generations deserve careful preservation, since these objects often exist in single, fragile copies.
Equally valuable is recording the texture of bilingual households — how a Ho-speaking grandmother code-switches into Odia for the market and back into Ho for prayer, since this lived negotiation between languages is itself a historical fact worth archiving before it fades into a single dominant tongue.
A closing thought
To hold an Austroasiatic language within a family's memory is to hold a thread that reaches back before most recorded Indian history began, and every recording, every transcribed lullaby or genealogy, keeps that thread from fraying further — perhaps it is worth asking the oldest voice in the family to speak a little of it today, while there is still time to listen.