Morphosyntactic reconstruction in an areal-historical context: A pre-historical relationship between North East India and Mainland Southeast Asia?

Abstract

North East India is an ethnolinguistic crossroads located at the intersection of South, East, and Southeast Asia (Figure 1). Geographically, culturally and linguistically, it is an exceptionally diverse region, in which the soaring glaciered peaks of the Eastern Himalaya contrast with the vast Brahmaputra river floodplain, and in which animist hunter-forager groups can be found in close proximity with Tibetan monasteries and modern South Asian urban economies. An untold number of villages of widely-varying socio-cultural makeup and productive strategies is found in between. Linguistic diversity in North East India is similarly high, with languages of the Tibeto-Burman, Indo-European, Austroasiatic and Tai-Kadai families represented, possibly in addition to a number of language isolates. Typologically, North East Indian languages exhibit features common to both the South Asian and Mainland Southeast Asian linguistic areas, albeit in different ways and to different degrees, depending on the particular language.