ABSTRACT
South Asia is an ethnolinguistically inordinately complex portion of the planet. The
topography of the greater Himalayan region has impeded migrations of peoples throughout prehistory. The result is an intricate patchwork of language phyla and
language isolates enmeshed in a geographically complex pattern. Languages of the
Altaic and Daic language families have encroached upon the periphery of the Hima-
layan region, whereas the Indian subcontinent is the home of Indo-European, Dravi-
dian, Tibeto-Burman and Austroasiatic languages. Moreover, South Asia is the home
to the language isolates Andamanese, Nahali, Kusunda and Vedda. Burushaski, which
was traditionally viewed as a language isolate, but has been shown to be a member of
the Karasuk language family, is distantly related to the Yenisseian languages. The Indo-European family tree of Stammbaum has traditionally been emblematic of
comparative linguistics. The family tree model is still a valid model of linguistic phy-
logeny, particularly with all of the qualifications and nuances which were already
explicitly formulated from the earliest days of historical linguistics and later enhanced
in the writings of Junggrammatiker, though these nuances have often been ignored by
laymen as well as some linguists. Yet even the Indo-European family tree has come to
look less like a tree today and increasingly resembles a bed of flowers sprouting forth
from a common primordial substrate, despite the recognition of higher-order branches such as Indo-Iranian, Balto-Slavic and Italo-Celtic. Below family trees will be depicted
of the three major language families which are either wholly or largely confined to the
Indian subcontinent and the greater Himalayan region, namely Tibeto-Burman, Aus-
troasiatic and Dravidian.
