"Munda languages of India are more distantly related to Mon-Khmer, all
together forming the Austroasiatic family. According to the ideas
discussed at the 2004 South East Asian Linguistic Society meeting in
Bangkok by Prof. David Stampe (Uni. Hawaii), India may be the homeland
of Austroasiatic, and Mon-Khmer reflects an offshoot that migrated
eastward. In this model there is not a simple split of Munda versus
MK, rather Austroasiatic has perhaps 3, 4 or more old branches, with
MK one of these, or an offshoot of one of these. In that case the
identification of a distinct Munda branch is premature, and it may be
better to reserve the term Munda for just the sub-group containing
Mundari, Santali etc. The division of North versus South Munda is
certainly oversimplified, according David Stampe (pers. com.) 4
sub-groups are reconstructable, but how they form a family tree is far
from clear." Paul Sidwell, May 2005
http://www.anu.edu.au/~u9907217/languages/languages.html
"Grierson, in the introduction to the Linguistic Survey of India,
at first doubted whether languages with such an opposite 'order of
ideas' as Munda and Mon-Khmer could be related at all (1904:2).
Schmidt (1906) established their genetic relationship, and Pinnow
(1959 et passim) has removed all reasonable doubts. But there remain
disagreements about what proto-Austroasiatic was like, and therefore
about the polar opposition of Munda and the eastern Austroasiatic
lanuages came aboutÂ…
"Munda languages have been seen as genetically related not only to
Mon-Khmer, but also Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, Burushaski, Nihali,
Vedda and geographically remote head-last languages like Finno-Ugric,
Turkic, Australian, Basque, and Japanese, by linguists who found deep
similarities in Munda.
{A bibliography is in Pinnow, Heinz-Jurgen, 1959, Versuch einer
historischen Lautlehre der Kharia-Sprache, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz,
pp. 480-486.} Â…
"Munda structures are far more various and cognates far fewer than
in Dravidian, and likewise than in eastern Austroasiatic. This
suggests that the Austroasiatic people may have dispersed from South
Asia rather than South-East Asia, and that the shift of Munda from
rising to falling rhythm, after the eastern languages had moved
eastward, may have been the cause rathern then the effect of the
profound polarization of South and South-East Asian language structures."
http://www.degruyter.de/journals/ysall/2004/pdf/2004_3.pdf
Rhythm and the synthetic drift of Munda by Patricia Donegan and David
Stampe
Dr. Kalyanaraman