Resources
Resources for Austroasiatic studies
Austroasiatic languages are spoken in a vast area stretching from Vietnam in the East to eastern India in the West, and Northern India in the North to Malaysia and the Nicobar Islands in the South. With Khmer in Cambodia and Vietnamese in Vietnam, two Austroastiatic languages have official status, while Mon and Khmer are among the earliest documented languages of Southeast Asia, with inscriptions going back to the 6th century CE.
In spite of their linguistic and historical importance, the study of Austroasiatic languages is much less advanced than other languages families of the area. An overview volume of the Austroasiatic languages, with a special focus on the non-Munda languages, was edited by Mathias Jenny from the University of Zurich and Paul Sidwell (then at the Australian National University) and published in 2014. More grammars and sketches of Austroasatic and other Southeast Asian languages will be published in the same Brill series (http://www.brill.com/products/series/mainland-and-insular-south-east-asia). Proposals for contributions are welcome, please contact the series editors for further information at [email protected].
For any inquiries or feedback on this site or ICAAL please email <[email protected]>.
ICAAL Info is a mailing list for ICAAL as well as related projects and activities.
ICAAL Projects
Three large and informative handbooks have grown out of ICAAL: The Handbook of Austroasiatic Languages (Jenny & Sidwell 2014), Austroasiatic Syntax in Areal and Diachronic Perspective (Jenny, Sidwell & Alves 2020) and The Languages and Linguistics of Mainland Southeast Asia: A Comprehensive Guide (Sidwell & Jenny 2021). Details on each book are available on our Projects page.
The History of ICAAL
Pages with historical information (including photographs) on the history of ICAAL and related meeting are found here. An earlier website for ICAAL that documents ICAAL-related activities is archived at http://icaal.org/. Please note, however, that that website is no longer being updated.
Standard Labels & Abbreviations for AA Grammatical Analysis
We have compiled a comprehensive list of recommended grammatical category labels and abbreviations for use in the description of Austroasaitic languages.
SEALang’s Huffman Archive
In the 1970’s, Franklin Huffman undertook extensive fieldwork on underdocumented Austroasiatic languages spoken Laos and Thailand. Scans of his original field notebooks and accompanying digitized word lists are available at SEALang’s Huffman Papers Archive. In addition, Huffman’s invaluable audio recordings of Katuic languages made at the same time are archived and available at SEALang’s Huffman Katuic Audio Archives.
SEALang’s Hayes Archive
La Vaughn Hayes had a keen interest in the history of Vietnamese and the Vietic languages. He spent many years painstakingly developing lists of likely cognate etyma between Vietnamese, other AA languages and langauges from other phyla. Hayes compiled these lists on a substantial number of index cards, which have since been photographed, archived and made available through SEALang’s La Vaughn Hayes Archive.
The Repository and Workspace for Austroasiatic Intangible Heritage
A major repository for Austroasiatic language data is RWAAI (Repository and Workspace for Austroasiatic Intangible Heritage), hosted by Lund University.