The Monic languages are a branch of the Austro-Asiatic

Austro-Asiatic languages

The Austro-Asiatic languages, in recent classifications synonymous with Mon–Khmer, are a large language family of Southeast Asia, also scattered throughout India and Bangladesh. The name Austro-Asiatic comes from the Latin words for "south" and "Asia", hence "South Asia"...

 language family

Language family

A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term 'family' comes from the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a...

 descended from the Old Monic language of the kingdom of Dvaravati

Dvaravati

The Dvaravati period lasted from the 6th to the 13th centuries. Dvaravati refers to both a culture and a disparate conglomerate of principalities.- History :...

 in what is now central Thailand. The Nyahkur people continue directly from that kingdom, whereas the Mon are descendants of those who migrated to Pegu after the 11th century Khmer conquest of Dvaravati.

Classification

Sidwell (2009:114) proposes the following tree ("stammbaum") for Monic, synthesizing past classifications from Therapan L-Thongkum (1984) and Diffloth (1984).

• Old Mon / Proto-Monic
  • Nyah Kur
    Nyah Kur language
    The Nyah Kur language is an Austroasiatic language spoken by a remnant of the Mon people of Dvaravati, the Nyah Kur people, who live in present-day Thailand...
    
    
    • North
    • Central
    • South
  • Middle Mon
    Mon language
    The Mon language is an Austroasiatic language spoken by the Mon, who live in Burma and Thailand. Mon, like the related language Cambodian—but unlike most languages in Mainland Southeast Asia—is not tonal. Mon is spoken by more than a million people today. In recent years, usage of Mon has...
    
    
    • Literary Mon
    • Mon Ro
    • Mon Rao
    • Thai Mon (mix of Mon Ro and Mon Rao)

Further reading

• Monic language studies. (1984). Bangkok, Thailand: Chulalongkorn University Print. House.

External links

• SEAlang Project: Mon–Khmer languages: The Monic Branch