[citation needed] Paul Sidwell (2018) suggests they arrived on the coast of modern-day Odisha about 4000–3500 years ago (c. 2000 – c. 1500 BCE) and spread after the Indo-Aryan migration to the region.

[14][15] Rau and Sidwell (2019),[16][17] along with Blench (2019),[18] suggest that pre-Proto-Munda had arrived in the Mahanadi River Delta around 1,500 BCE from Southeast Asia via a maritime route, rather than overland.

He proposes instead, on the basis of morphological comparisons, that Proto-South Munda split directly into Diffloth's three daughter groups, Kharia–Juang, Sora–Gorum (Savara), and Gutob–Remo–Gtaʼ (Remo).

Inherited Austroasiatic glottalized stop and nasalized release of Munda are noteworthy unique phonotactic features in South Asia.

South Munda displays tendency toward initial clusters, CCVC word shape, with best examples are manifested in the Gtaʔ case.

Donegan & Stampe (2004) posited overarching assumptions that all Munda languages have completely redesigned their word prosodic structure from proto-Austroasiatic sesquisyllablic, iambic and reduced vowel to Indic norms of trochaic, falling rhythm, stable or assimilationist consonants and harmonised vowels, making them oppose to Eastern Austroasiatic languages at almost every level.

The presence of clitics and affixes even does not drive Kharia word prosodic structure to that of a trochaic and falling system Peterson (2011b).

[38] Morphologically, both North and South Munda subgroups mainly focus on the head or the verb, thus they are primarily head-marking, in contrast to dependent-marking Indo-European and Dravidian families.

[40][41] Case markers on nominals to show syntactic alignments, i.e. nominative-accusative, ergative-absolutive, are largely absent or not systematically developed among the Munda languages except Korku.

At clause/sentence level, Munda languages are head-final, but internally head-first in referent indexation, compounds, and noun incorporation verb complexes.

Kherwarian is a large language continuum with speakers extending west to east from the Indian states of Uttar Pradesh to Assam, north to south from Nepal to Odisha.

The fourteen Kherwarian languages are Asuri, Birhor, Bhumij, Koda, Ho, Korwa (Korowa), Mundari, Mahali, Santali, Turi, Agariya, Bijori, Koraku, and Karmali, with the total number of speakers surpassing ten million (2011 census).

Kherwarian are often highlighted due to their elaborate and complex templatic and pronominalized predicate are so pervasive that it is obligatory for the verb to encode TAM, valency, voices, possessive, transitivity, clear distinction between exclusive and inclusive first persons, and index with all arguments, including non-arguments like possessors.

tʄeɳe-kobird-PLnam-oɽaʔ-ta-n-a=kofind-house-ASP-INTR-FIN=3PL.SUBJtʄeɳe-ko nam-oɽaʔ-ta-n-a=kobird-PL find-house-ASP-INTR-FIN=3PL.SUBJ'the birds are getting into their nests (and trying to lay an egg)'Unlike the Kherwarian languages with their complex verbal morphology, the Korku verb is moderately simple with modest amount of synthesis.

Similar to Hindi and Sadani, Kharia has made a calque to form sequential converbs (conjunctive participles) kon (derived from ikon, ‘do’).

apa2DUa-ma-ɉim-ke2DU.SUBJ-NEG-eat-PRESetebecauseain1SGkikibRED~doɉenaNEG.COPapa a-ma-ɉim-ke ete ain kikib ɉena2DU 2DU.SUBJ-NEG-eat-PRES because 1SG RED~do NEG.COP'Because you don’t eat (it), I didn’t do it'Noun incorporation is fossilized in lexical compounds and words like body parts being combined with the verb ‘wash’.

Words for domesticated animal and plant species like dog, millet, chicken, goat, pig, rice are shared.

[55] It is clear that hundreds of non-Indo-European words in Vedic Sanskrit that Kuiper (1948) attributed to Munda has been rejected through careful analysis.

[55] Except for words like ‘cotton’, there is a surprising absence of Ancient Sanskrit and Medieval Indian borrowings of animal & plant names from Munda.

Scholars believe that the Munda tribes typically occupied a marginalized and lowly socioeconomic position in the Hinduized society of Vedic South Asia, or did not participate in the Hindu caste system and had barely any contacts with Hindus at all.

Witzel (1999) and Southworth (2005) proposed that the early non-Indo-European words with ka- prefix in Vedic Sanskrit belonged to a hypothetical ‘Para-Munda substratum’ that they believed to be part of the Harappan language.

[56] This would imply that Austroasiatic speakers might have penetrated as far as the Panjab and Afghanistan in the early second millennium BC, whereas Osada (2009) refuted Witzel that those words might have been, in fact, Dravidian compounds.