Austroasiatic

The Austroasiatic family is the native language group of mainland Southeast Asia, reaching from the Munda and Khasi languages of eastern India to Vietnamese, Khmer and Mon.

Linguists trace its ancestral speech to the Red River Delta or nearby southern China in the second half of the third millennium BC, when rice and millet farmers dispersed along the coasts and up the Mekong and other river valleys; by about 500 BC the main branches had settled roughly their present lands.

Only Mon, Khmer and Vietnamese carry long written traditions. The Mon adopted an Indic-derived script by the sixth century and became teachers of Theravada Buddhism, Old Khmer served the Angkor kingdom, and Vietnamese was long written in the Chinese-derived Chữ Nôm script. Most sister languages remained unwritten tongues of hill peoples, bordered by Tai, Burman and Malay speakers.