Towards a linguistic prehistory of eastern-central South Asia (and beyond)

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The primary goal of the project will be to determine prehistoric language contacts in South Asia by examining the distribution of morphosyntactic patterns in languages of the region from different families, above all in eastern-central South Asia, and checking these for potential areal and genealogical trends, constantly viewing this information against the backdrop of what is known of the history of this region and South Asia in general. To achieve this goal, the team will compile a fine-grained morphosyntactic database on up to ca. 150 languages from the core area and selected languages from throughout South Asia. Finally, the project will contribute considerably to our present knowledge of the languages of this region by conducting field work on several languages of the region on which very little is known.