The Austric languages are a proposed language family that includes the Austronesian languages spoken in Taiwan, Maritime Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, and Madagascar, as well as the Austroasiatic languages spoken in Mainland Southeast Asia and South Asia. A genetic relationship between these language families is seen as plausible by some scholars, but remains unproven. Additionally, the Kra–Dai languages and Hmong–Mien languages are included by some linguists, and even Japanese was speculated to be Austric in an early version of the hypothesis. History The Austric macrofamily was first proposed by the German missionary Wilhelm Schmidt in 1906. He showed phonological, morphological, and lexical evidence to support the existence of an Austric phylum consisting of Austroasiatic and Austronesian. Schmidt's proposal had a mixed reception among scholars of Southeast Asian languages, and received only little scholarly attention in the following decades. Research interest into Austric resurged in the late 20th century, culminating in a series of articles by La Vaughn H. Hayes who presented a corpus of Proto-Austric vocabulary together with a reconstruction of Proto-Austric phonology, and by Lawrence Reid, focussing on morphological evidence. Evidence Reid (2005) lists the following pairs as "probable" cognates between Proto-Austroasiatic and Proto-Austronesian. Among the morphological evidence, he compares reconstructed affixes such as the following, and notes that shared infixes are less likely to be borrowed (for a further discussion of infixes in Southeast Asian languages, see also Barlow 2022). prefix *pa- 'causative' (Proto-Austroasiatic, Proto-Austronesian) infix *-um- 'agentive' (Proto-Austroasiatic, Proto-Austronesian) infix *-in- 'instrumental' (Proto-Austroasiatic), 'nominalizer' (Proto-Austronesian) Below are 10 selected Austric lexical comparisons by Diffloth (1994), as cited in Sidwell & Reid (2021): Extended proposals The first extension to Austric was first proposed Wilhelm Schmidt himself, who speculated about including Japanese within Austric, mainly because of assumed similarities between Japanese and the Austronesian languages. While the proposal about a link between Austronesian and Japanese still enjoys some following as a separate hypothesis, the inclusion of Japanese was not adopted by later proponents of Austric. In 1942, Paul K. Benedict provisionally accepted the Austric hypothesis and extended it to include the Kra–Dai (Thai–Kadai) languages as an immediate sister branch to Austronesian, and further speculated on the possibility to include the Hmong–Mien (Miao–Yao) languages as well. However, he later abandoned the Austric proposal in favor of an extended version of the Austro-Tai hypothesis. Sergei Starostin adopted Benedict's extended 1942 version of Austric (i.e. including Kra–Dai and Hmong–Mien) within the