The Austric macrofamily was first proposed by the German missionary Wilhelm Schmidt in 1906. He showed phonological, morphological, and lexical evidence to support the existence of an Austric phylum consisting of Austroasiatic and Austronesian.[4][a] Schmidt's proposal had a mixed reception among scholars of Southeast Asian languages, and received only little scholarly attention in the following decades.[5]
Research interest into Austric resurged in the late 20th century,[6] culminating in a series of articles by La Vaughn H. Hayes who presented a corpus of Proto-Austric vocabulary together with a reconstruction of Proto-Austric phonology,[7] and by Lawrence Reid, focussing on morphological evidence.[8]
Among the morphological evidence, he compares reconstructed affixes such as the following, and notes that shared infixes are less likely to be borrowed (for a further discussion of infixes in Southeast Asian languages, see also Barlow 2022[10]).[11]
The first extension to Austric was first proposed Wilhelm Schmidt himself, who speculated about including Japanese within Austric, mainly because of assumed similarities between Japanese and the Austronesian languages.[14] While the proposal about a link between Austronesian and Japanese still enjoys some following as a separate hypothesis, the inclusion of Japanese was not adopted by later proponents of Austric.
Sergei Starostin adopted Benedict's extended 1942 version of Austric (i.e. including Kra–Dai and Hmong–Mien) within the framework of his larger Dené–Daic proposal, with Austric as a coordinate branch to Dené–Caucasian, as shown in the tree below.[17]
In the second half of the last century, Paul K. Benedict raised a vocal critique of the Austric proposal, eventually calling it an 'extinct' proto-language.[19][16]
Hayes' lexical comparisons, which were presented as supporting evidence for Austric between 1992 and 2001, were criticized for the greater part as methodologically unsound by several reviewers.[20][21]Robert Blust, a leading scholar in the field of Austronesian comparative linguistics, pointed out "the radical disjunction of morphological and lexical evidence" which characterizes the Austric proposal; while he accepts the morphological correspondences between Austronesian and Austroasiatic as possible evidence for a remote genetic relationship, he considers the lexical evidence unconvincing.[22]
A 2015 analysis using the Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP) did not support the Austric hypothesis. In this analysis, the supposed "core" components of Austric were assigned to two separate, unrelated clades: Austro-Tai and Austroasiatic-Japonic.[23] Note however that ASJP is not widely accepted among historical linguists as an adequate method to establish or evaluate relationships between language families.[24]
^The terms "Austroasiatic" and "Austronesian" were in fact both coined by Schmidt. The previous common designations "Mon-Khmer" and "Malayo-Polynesian" are still in use, but each with a scope that is more limited than "Austroasiatic" and "Austronesian".
^Sidwell, Paul; Reid, Lawrence A. (2021). "Language macro-families and distant phylogenetic relations in MSEA". The Languages and Linguistics of Mainland Southeast Asia. De Gruyter. pp. 261–276. doi:10.1515/9783110558142-015. ISBN9783110558142. S2CID238653052.
^Diffloth, Gérard. 1994. The lexical evidence for Austric, so far. Oceanic Linguistics 33(2): 309–322.
——— (1976). "Austro-Thai and Austroasiatic". In Jenner, Philip N.; Thompson, Laurence C.; Starosta, Stanley (eds.). Austroasiatic Studies, Part I. Oceanic Linguistics Special Publications. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press. pp. 1–36. JSTOR20019153.
——— (1991). "Austric: An 'Extinct' Proto-language". In Davidson, Jeremy H. C. S. (ed.). Austroasiatic Languages: Essays in Honour of H. L. Shorto. London: School of Oriental and African Studies. pp. 7–11.
——— (1999). "New linguistic evidence for the Austric hypothesis". In Zeitoun, Elizabeth; Li, Paul Jen-kuei (eds.). Selected Papers from the Eighth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics. Taipei: Academia Sinica. pp. 5–30.
——— (2005). "The current status of Austric: A review and evaluation of the lexical and morphosyntactic evidence". In Sagart, Laurent; Blench, Roger; Sanchez-Mazas, Alicia (eds.). The peopling of East Asia: putting together archaeology, linguistics and genetics. London: Routledge Curzon. hdl:10125/33009.
——— (2009). "Austric Hypothesis". In Brown, Keith; Ogilvie, Sarah (eds.). Concise Encyclopaedia of Languages of the World. Oxford: Elsevier. pp. 92–94.
Schmidt, Wilhelm (1906). "Die Mon–Khmer-Völker, ein Bindeglied zwischen Völkern Zentralasiens und Austronesiens ('[The Mon–Khmer Peoples, a Link between the Peoples of Central Asia and Austronesia')". Archiv für Anthropologie. 5: 59–109.
——— (1930). "Die Beziehungen der austrischen Sprachen zum Japanischen ('The connections of the Austric languages to Japanese')". Wiener Beitrag zur Kulturgeschichte und Linguistik. 1: 239–51..
Shorto, H. L. (1976). "In Defense of Austric". Computational Analyses of Asian and African Languages. 6: 95–104.
Blazhek, Vaclav. 2000. Comments on Hayes "The Austric Denti-alveolar Sibilants". Mother Tongue V:15-17.
Blust, Robert. 1996. Beyond the Austronesian homeland: The Austric hypothesis and its implications for archaeology. In: Prehistoric Settlement of the Pacific, ed. by Ward H.Goodenough, ISBN978-0-87169-865-0 DIANE Publishing Co, Collingdale PA, 1996, pp. 117–137. (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 86.5. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society).
Blust, Robert. 2000. Comments on Hayes, "The Austric Denti-alveolar Sibilants". Mother Tongue V:19-21.
Fleming, Hal. 2000. LaVaughn Hayes and Robert Blust Discuss Austric. Mother Tongue V:29-32.
Hayes, La Vaughn H. 2000. Response to Blazhek's Comments. Mother Tongue V:33-4.
Hayes, La Vaughn H. 2000. Response to Blust's Comments. Mother Tongue V:35-7.
Hayes, La Vaughn H. 2000. Response to Fleming's Comments. Mother Tongue V:39-40.
Hayes, La Vaughn H. 2001. Response to Sidwell. Mother Tongue VI:123-7.
Reid, Lawrence A. 1996. The current state of linguistic research on the relatedness of the language families of East and Southeast Asia. In: Ian C. Glover and Peter Bellwood, editorial co-ordinators, Indo-Pacific Prehistory: The Chiang Mai Papers, Volume 2, pp . 87–91. Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association 15. Canberra: Australian National University.
Sidwell, Paul. 2001. Comments on La Vaughn H. Hayes' "On the Origin of Affricates in Austric". Mother Tongue VI:119-121.
Van Driem, George. 2000. Four Austric Theories. Mother Tongue V:23-27.
