The Munda language are a group of Austroasiatic languages spoken in central and eastern India by several million people. The Munda peoples are generally believed to represent the so-called “tribal” autochthons of their current areas of in habitation. Originally, Munda speaking peoples probably extended over a somewhat larger area before being marginalized into the relatively remote hill country and forested areas in the states ofOdisha, Madhya Pradesh, and isolated pockets in adjacent areas of Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, and Maharashtra by the encroachment of Indo-Aryan-speakers and, at an earlier period, Dravidian-speakers. The one exception to this is in the newly constituted and nearly tribal-dominant state Jharkhand (capital Ranchi).