Overview

As encapsulated in the designation Indo-China, much of Southeast Asia has long been seen as a zone of overlapping influences from the two great neighbouring zones to its west and north. This tendency holds as much in language as it does in culture and (pre)history more widely. Invoking the linguistic incarnation of this influence, the Indianised kingdoms of Southeast Asia, both mainland and islands, have duly been alternatively dubbed “the Sanskrit cosmopolis” (Pollock 1996). As just one example among many, the monuments of the Champa kingdom, on the shores of the South China Sea in Vietnam, are inscribed in Sanskrit, thousands of kilometres from that language’s origins in the northwestern corner of South Asia. Its sister language, Pāli, enjoyed similarly wide influence as the liturgical language of the scriptures of the Theravada form of Buddhism that likewise spread across Southeast Asia. Indeed writing itself was another of the incoming cultural influences, thanks to which our records of a good number of the language lineages in this region go back far earlier than in most of the rest of the world, save for Western Asia and the Mediterranean. Such records are a boon for the task in hand here, though by no means our only way of using language data to illuminate prehistory (see Chapter 1.3, p. 21).

Nor was it any accident that it was in India itself that the very discipline of historical and comparative linguistics was so famously launched, by Sir William Jones in Calcutta, with his recognition in 1786 of Sanskrit’s undeniable relationship of common origin with Latin, Greek, Persian and many modern languages of Western Asia and Europe. More than two millennia before, Pāṇini and other grammarians of Sanskrit had already reached a level of sophistication in linguistic analysis that many consider unequalled until the modern era.