Diversity

For an urban resident of Thailand it is relatively easy to overlook the fact that South-East Asia is linguistically a very diverse region. Within a 700 km radius from Bangkok, four major families are represented with literally hundreds of very different languages. In addition there is the isolate Hmong-Mien group. See the pictures below.

The least well known of the three big groups is the Austroasiatic family. Within the group, only Khmer (Cambodian), Vietnamese and Mon, now moribund, have a substantial written history; they are assumed to have a common ancestor at an estimated time depth of 6500 years.

In historical linguistics, now the bête noire of institutional language research, there is a small but tenacious community of "superfamily freaks", who spend their efforts trying to prove or disprove the interrelatedness of language families. In addition to the fabled Nostratic, they have postulated an immensely conjectural Austric macrofamily; at its widest this monster would include all of Austroasiatic, Tai-Kadai, Austronesian and Hmong-Mien. This hypothesis by the eminent Paul K. Benedict dates from 1942, surely a golden year for pre-scientific historical linguistics. One stated rationale for this racial genetics of languages is to trace cultural and population dispersal; among the unfortunate drawbacks are the sheer time depths (ca. 14,000 years for Nostratic, probably about the same for Austric), a flawed methodology and an utter lack of reliable material for most of the languages involved...