The language of the Mundah, Kur, and other Kol races differs from the northern languages not only in its greater fluency and agglutinative and inchoate flexional tendency, but in its dissyllabic character, its profusion of dual and relative forms of the pronouns, and in the position of the qualit we before the substantive.
Three lists of words were obtained by Captain Houghton from Chyebassa in Central India, and two by Colonel Ouseley from Chutia Nagpur, all of which Mr. Hodgson regarded as dialects of the great Kol language. The Oraon speech he traced without difficulty to that of the hillmen of the Rajmahal and Bhagulpttr ranger:. He considers that between those several Kol tongues and that of the Gond of the Vindhya there are obvious links. But Professor Max Muller says they have no affinity whatever. Mr. Elliot showed that much resemblance both in vocables and structure exists between that Gond language and the cultivated tongues of the Deklian.
From the geographical distribution of the Kol and Dravidian languages, Mr. Hislop concludes that while the stream of Dravidian population, as evidenced by the Brahui in Baluchistan, entered India by the north-west, that of the Kol family seems to have found admission by the north=east, and as the one flowed south towards Cape Kumari, and the other in the same direction towards Cape Romania, a part of each appears to have met and crossed in Central India. This hypothesis rests on the presence of the Brahui where they are, a fact which is not inconsistent, however, with the supposition that the Dravidian tribes may also have entered India from the north-east or even across the Himalaya, as the Kanawar, Newar, Chepang, and other tribes have done ; while the Kol tribes were an offshoot. from a later horde,
the main body of which entered the Eastern Peninsula. The Brahui may have been driven westward by the invading Arya from the Upper Indus. To the early Arya the prior tribes were known as Dasi, who, Dr. J. Wilson tells us, were not altogether barbarians, for they had distinctive cities and other establishments of at least a partial civilisation. Then, as now, they were darker than the Arya ; and, according to Dr. Wilson, the more marked Turanians in Gujerat and other provinces are still denominated the Kali Praja (corrupted into Parej) or black population. 111 former times the Kol tribes possessed the whole of Chutia Nagpur, which may now be said to be divided between them and the Dhangar or Oraon, who carne from Rotasghur. The chief men in most of the villages are still, however, of the Mundah or Kol tribe, and they do not intermarry with the Dhangar. The greater part of Sing bin= is inhabited by Kol, and we find them numerous in Bamanghotty, and dispersed to the vicinities of Cuttack and Midnapur. The Lurka Kol, as they are termed, inhabit those extensive tracts, as yet but little known, which go under the name of the Kolehan.—E. Balfour in Jameson's Edinburgh Journal, 1843 ; lb. in Journal of Beng. As. Soc., 1844 ; Dr. Voysey's Journal ; Campbell; Dalton, pp. 150-185; Sir Walter Elliot in Journ. R. A. S., 1861 ; Mason, Burma ; Aitcheson, Treaties, etc. p. 170; Mr. Hislop iu Journ. Ant. Soc. lVagpur ; Logan, Journ. Ind. Arch., 1853 ; Trans. R. As. Soc.; Lieutenant Uckell in Beng. As. Soc. AMYL., 1840; Cunning ham's Ancient India ; Dalton's Ethnology.