East and Southeast Asia, and the Pacific

The Chinese and Mainland Southeast Asian language families

The earliest Neolithic cultures of the Yellow and Yangzi basins enshrine the ancestry of not just the Sinitic peoples. Neolithic China contains the common roots of many other populations in East and Southeast Asia, plus Oceania. Thus, while the Yangshao culture could conceivably be ancestral to the Han Chinese, so likewise the contemporary Neolithic cultures of Fujian and Taiwan could be ancestral to the Austronesians, and those of southern China to the Austroasiaticand Tai-speaking peoples. However, these oldest Neolithic cultures long predate the precipitation of any sharply defined modem ethnolinguistic identities. This is sometimes a very hard concept to get across to modern lecture audiences, who react with puzzlement when told that many Southeast Asian cultures appear to have ultimate origins in southern China at about 7,000 years ago. People find it hard to think of "China" as ever having been anything other than just like modem China - full of people speaking Chinese languages, looking like Chinese, and presumably identifying in some way as "Han."

This concept of an unchanging ethnic landscape is utterly wrong. A voluminous historical record tells us that Han Chinese populations have spread within the past 2,500 years, following the Eastern Zhou and Qin military conquests, over much of what is now China south of the Yangzi. This type of situation, whereby the languages of dominant populations have erased earlier linguistic landscapes, even within the same family, is of course very common across the world and can render the true course of ethnolinguistic history sometimes hard to discern (Diamond and Bellwood 2003). The replacement of the Anatolian languages by first Greek and later Turkish creates similar problems for reconstructing the Indo-European homeland, just as the replacement of many indigenous languages by English and Spanish creates similar problems in the Western Hemisphere.

Within China and Southeast Asia there are three language families which appear to represent primary dispersals of agricultural populations through

landscapes that were mostly occupied previously by hunting and gathering groups. These are the Sino-Tibetan, Austroasiatic, and Austronesian families. In addition, Japanese evidently spread to Japan around 300 BC with Yayoi rice farmers from Korea, replacing the languages of Jomon "hunter-gatherers" (Hudson 1999, 2003). A similar case for Neolithic spread could perhaps be made for the remote antecedents of Korean itself, and we return to Japanese and Korean later in connection with the "Altaic" language family. The present-day distributions of Austroasiatic and Sino-Tibetan are shown in Figures 10.7 and 10.8 (for Austronesian see Figure 7.4).

The Austroasiatic language family, the most widespread and also the most geographically fragmented language family in Mainland Southeast Asia and eastern India, includes approximately 150 languages in two major subgroups; Mon-Khmer of Southeast Asia, and Munda of northeastern India. The MonKhmer subgroup is the largest and contains Mon, Khmer, and Vietnamese, as well as Khasi in Assam, the Aslian languages of Peninsular Malaysia, and Nicobarese (Parkin 1991). We have already met the Munda languages of Bihar, Orissa, and West Bengal in the discussion of South Asia. The very disjointed distribution of the Austroasiastic family today suggests that it represents the oldest major language dispersal recognizable in Southeast Asia, one overlain by many expansive languages of later civilizations such as Burmese and Karen (both Tibeto-Burman), Thai, Malay, Khmer, and Vietnamese (the last two being Austroasiatic).

One observation of great interest is that the reconstructed vocabulary of ProtoAustroasiatic contained terms for rice cultivation (Pejros and Schnirelman 1998; Mahdi 1998; Higham 2003). The possibility that Austroasiatic languages were once spoken very widely in southern China, with place-name traces even as far north as the Yangzi River, is also worthy of note (Norman and Mei 1976). The homeland of Austroasiatic is not clear owing to massive overlying expansion of other language families, but most linguists suggest southern China or northern mainland Southeast Asia. Pejros and Schnirelman (1998) suggest a homeland near the middle Yangzi.

Figure 10.8 A) The distributions of the major subgroups of the Sino-Tibetan language family, after Ruhlen 1987. B) Suggested homelands for the major language families of China and Southeast Asia.

We turn now to the great modern population juggernaut represented by

SinoTibetan (Figure 10.8). In recent years, linguists have given some remarkably divergent opinions on the homeland for this family. Ilya Peiros (1998) suggests northern South Asia, George van Driem (1999, 2003) favors Sichuan, James Matisoff (1991, 2000) points to the Himalayan Plateau. Juha Janhunen (1996:222) presents in my view the most likely homeland hypothesis by associating the early Sino-Tibetan languages with the Yellow River Neolithic (Yangshao culture), but this is partly based on archaeological reasoning. Jerry Norman (1988:17) merely states that the homeland is unknown, but notes that, on the way to the Yellow River, the early Sino-Tibetan languages borrowed from early Hmong-Mien and early Austroasiatic languages, thus implying a slightly southerly origin. This is quite likely, given that Proto-Sino-Tibetan also has strong reconstructions for rice cultivation (Pejros and Schnirelman 1998; Sagart 2003).

Clearly, the range of views here is extremely varied. Sino-Tibetan subgrouping is rake-like rather than tree-like in structure, a possible indicator of a fast and widespread early radiation, similar to that reconstructed for the Malayo-Polynesian languages within Austronesian. As already noted, such fast radiations do not lend themselves to homeland identification, and van Driem (2003) uses the metaphor of "fallen leaves" to describe the Sino-Tibetan subgrouping situation. Given this, and the erasure of much early patterning caused by Sinitic expansion, my own preference would be to move straight into the reasoning behind the farming/ language dispersal hypothesis. This would place the homeland of Sino-Tibetan in the agricultural heartland area of central China, as preferred by Janhunen, and to a lesser extent by van Driem (Sichuan is a little west of the core region of Neolithic development, but it does border on the middle Yangzi). Such reasoning might be deemed unacceptably dependent upon the archaeology, but central China has unbroken and impressive cultural continuity from Neolithic into Chinese historical times. No other region within the Sino-Tibetan distribution can compete in this regard.

Of the other Mainland Southeast Asian language families, Hmong-Mien is most likely to have originated closest to the central Yangzi early rice zone, although the actual dispersal of this group as hill tribes into Southeast Asia has been relatively recent and due in part to pressure from the Chinese state. Peiros (1998:160) suggests that a combined Austroasiatic/Hmong-Mien grouping could have a glottochronological age of about 8,000 years, but whether

Austroasiatic and Hmong-Mien languages are indeed related genetically is a matter for linguists to decide - the prospect is at least interesting since such genetic relationship would automatically imply propinquity of homeland. The Hmong-Mien family may also have provided a substratum for the Sinitic language of the kingdom of Chu in the middle Yangzi basin, during the later first millennium Bc (Ballard 1985).

The Tai languages are, as a group, not of great antiquity, with a diversification history dating within the past 4,000 years according to Peiros (1998; see also Ostapirat in press). Their homeland probably lay in the southern Chinese provinces of Guizhou, Guangxi, and Guangdong, the latter occupied today by Sinitic languages. The ultimate spread of the Tai family into Thailand and Laos probably reflected Chinese demographic and military pressure, and has occurred mainly within the past 1,000 years. According to Laurent Sagart (in press), the initial break-up of the Tai languages occurred during a period of contact with Malayo-Polynesian languages within the Austronesian family. This is an interesting observation, and one which probably places the initial genesis of Tai within Neolithic times in coastal southern China and Northern Vietnam.

As far as these four language families are concerned, we can perhaps hypothesize on linguistic grounds that, around 6000 BC, ancestral Hmong-Mien languages were located to the immediate south of the middle Yangzi, with early Austroasiatic languages further to the southwest and early Tai languages to the southeast (Figure 10.8B). In the first instance, only the Austroasiatic and SinoTibetan groups underwent expansion, with Hmong-Mien and Tai presumably remaining relatively circumscribed by these expansions until later.