Santali, belonging to the Austroasiatic family and having a tradition traceable from pre-Aryan days retained its distinct identity and co-existed with Bengali, a language belonging to the Indo-Aryan family, within the boundary of Bengal.
Diffloth is known for his widely cited 1974 and 2005 classification of the Austroasiatic languages.
However, his greater fame lies in his contributions to the Munda languages and to Austroasiatic linguistics in general.
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Patrilines within Haplogroup O-M95 predominate among the Austroasiatic-speaking populations of South and Southeast Asia, such as the Khmer of Cambodia and the Khasi of Meghalaya in northeastern India.
Most languages spoken in India belong either to the Indo-European (ca. 74%), the Dravidian (ca. 24%), the Austroasiatic (Munda) (ca. 1.2%), or the Tibeto-Burman (ca. 0.6%) families, with some languages of the Himalayas still unclassified.
They constitute a branch of the Austroasiatic language family, which means they are distantly related to Vietnamese and Khmer (Cambodian).
Six indigenous Nicobarese languages are spoken on the islands, which are part of the Mon–Khmer branch of the Austroasiatic language family, which includes Mon, Khmer and Vietnamese languages of Southeast Asia, and the Munda languages of India.
Attempts have been made to relate it to many other language families, including Altaic, Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Nihali, and the putative Indo-Pacific stock.
The Pearic languages are a group of endangered languages of the Eastern Mon–Khmer branch of the Austroasiatic language family, spoken by Pear people (the Por, the Samré, the Samray, the Suoy, and the Chong) living in western Cambodia and southeastern Thailand.
Munda got an opportunity for getting higher education in linguistics in an interdisciplinary atmosphere, from an ambitious research project of the University of Chicago, on the Indic group of the Austroasiatic languages under the guidance of Norman Zide.
The Shompen languages, of which there are at least two, are very little known, but appear to be unrelated to Nicobarese, an isolated group of Austroasiatic languages, and perhaps even to each other.