Languages in Cambodia
The beautiful and exotic country of Cambodia, officially known as the Kingdom of Cambodia and formerly referred to as the Khmer Empire, is a sovereign nation situated in the southern half of the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. The country shares borders with Thailand to the northwest, Laos to the northeast, Vietnam to the east and the Gulf of Thailand to the southwest.Cambodia has a population of over 14.8 million inhabitants, making it the world’s 70-most populous country. The official religion of the country is Theravada Buddhism, which is practiced by approximately 95 percent of the Cambodian population. Minority groups living in the country include Vietnamese, Chinese, Chams and over 30 different hill tribes, each with their own distinct culture, language and traditions.
Languages Spoken In Cambodia
The overwhelming majority of the Cambodian population, even those that are not native to the country, speak the language known as Khmer, the official language of the country. Ethnic Khmer living in Thailand, in Vietnam, and in Laos speak dialects of Khmer that are more or less intelligible to Khmer speakers from Cambodia. Minority languages present in Cambodia include Vietnamese, Cham (and other Austronesian languages), and the languages of the various hill tribes.
The Khmer Language and Cambodia
The Khmer language belongs to the Mon-Khmer family of the Austroasiatic phylum of languages. American linguists David Thomas and Robert Headley have divided the Mon-Khmer family into nine branches: Pearic in western Cambodia and eastern Thailand; Khmer in Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos; Bahnaric in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia; Katuic in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia; Khmuic in Laos, Thailand, and China; Monic in Burma and Thailand; Palaungic in Burma, China, and Thailand; Khasi in Assam (India); and Viet-Muong in Vietnam. Of the languages in the Mon-Khmer family, Vietnamese has the largest number of speakers (about 47 million); Khmer, has the next largest (about 8 million).
Khmer, also known as Cambodian, is by far the most popular language in Cambodia. With approximately 16 million speakers, it is the second most widely spoken Austroasiatic language in the world (after Vietnamese). Khmer has been considerably influenced by Sanskrit and Pali, especially in the royal and religious registers, particularly through the religions of Hinduism and Buddhism. It is also the earliest recorded and earliest written language of the Mon–Khmer family, predating Mon and, by a significant margin, Vietnamese. The Khmer language has influenced, and also been influenced by, Thai, Lao, Vietnamese, Chinese and Cham, all of which, due to geographical proximity and long-term cultural contact, have merged together in peninsular Southeast Asia.
Khmer, in contrast to Vietnamese, Thai, Lao, and Chinese, is a non-tonal language. What this means is that native Khmer words may be composed of one or two syllables, and although the language is uninflected, it does possess a rich system of affixes, including infixes, for derivation. Generally speaking, Khmer has nouns (including pronouns as a special subcategory), verbs (including static verbs or adjectives), adverbs, and various kinds of words called particles (including verbal auxiliaries, prepositions, conjunctions, final particles, and interjections). Many Khmer words change from one part of speech to another, depending on the context. The normal word order is subject-verb-object, and adjectival modifiers follow the nouns they modify.
As mentioned above, Khmer is a member of the Austroasiatic language family, the most archaic family in an area that stretches from the Malay Peninsula through Southeast Asia to East India. Austroasiatic, which also includes Mon, Vietnamese and Munda, has been studied since 1856 and was first proposed as a language family in 1907. Despite the amount of research, there is still doubt about the internal relationship of the languages of Austroasiatic family. Most classifications place Khmer in the eastern branch of a Mon-Khmer sub-grouping. In these classification schemes, Khmer's closest genetic relatives are the Bahnaric and Pearic languages. More recent classifications doubt the validity of the Mon-Khmer sub-grouping and place the Khmer language as its own branch of Austroasiatic, separate from the other 12 branches of the family.
Khmer is written in a script derived from a south Indian alphabet. The language has symbols for thirty-three consonants, twenty-four dependent vowels, twelve independent vowels, and several diacritic. Most consonants have reduced or modified forms, called subscripts, but only when they occur as the second member of a consonant cluster. Vowels may be written before, after, over, or under a consonant symbol.
Some efforts to standardize Khmer spelling have been attempted, but inconsistencies persist, and many words have more than one accepted spelling. A two-volume dictionary prepared under the direction of the Venerable Chuon Nath of the Buddhist Institute in Phnom Penh is the standard work on Khmer lexicography.
Khmer is divided into three stages—Old Khmer (seventh to twelfth century A.D.), Middle Khmer (twelfth to seventeenth century A.D.), and Modern Khmer (seventeenth century to the present). The earliest inscription in Khmer, found at Angkor Borei in Takev Province south of Phnom Penh in Cambodia, dates from A.D. 611.
The Vietnamese Language and Cambodia
Due to the proximity between Cambodia and Vietnam, many inhabitants of the former speak the Vietnamese language as either their first or second language.
Vietnamese is the national, official language of Vietnam and the native language of the Vietnamese people. It is also the language of choice for over three million native Vietnamese residing elsewhere, including Cambodia. The Vietnamese vocabulary has borrowings from Chinese, and once used a modified set of Chinese characters called “chữ nôm.” Today, the Vietnamese alphabet is based on a Latin alphabet with additional diacritics for tones and certain letters.
Like Khmer, Vietnamese was identified more than 150 years ago as part of the Mon–Khmer branch of the Austroasiatic language family (a family that also includes various tribal and regional languages, such as the Munda and Khasi languages spoken in eastern India, and others in southern China). Later, Muong was found to be more closely related to Vietnamese than other Mon–Khmer languages, and a Viet-Muong sub-grouping was established.
Like in other east Asian countries, the lexicon of Vietnam is heavily influenced by that of the Chinese, especially words relating to science and politics. Some 30-60 percent of the vocabulary has naturalized word borrowings from China, although many compound words are composed of native Vietnamese words combined with naturalized word borrowings (for example, having Vietnamese pronunciation). One can usually distinguish between a native Vietnamese word and a Chinese borrowing if its meaning does not change when the tone is shifted. As a result of French occupation, the Vietnamese language has since had many words borrowed from the French language, for example ca-phe (from the French café). Nowadays, many new words are being added to the language's lexicon due to heavy Western cultural influence; these are usually borrowed from English, such as the word TV, expressed in the Vietnamese written form as “tivi.”
Like other southeast Asian languages, Vietnamese has a comparatively large number of vowels. These Vietnamese vowels are all pronounced with an inherent tone, one that is centered on the main vowel or group of vowels.
Other Languages Spoken in Cambodia: The Austronesian Languages
Although the vast majority (95 percent) of the Cambodian people speak the Central Khmer language, there are a few other languages that can be heard throughout various regions of the country, including several Austronesian languages. The Austronesian languages are spread over vast areas of Asia and the Pacific, from Madagascar to Easter Island and from Taiwan to Malaysia. Four Austronesian languages—Cham, Jarai, Rade, and Malay—are spoken in Cambodia. Of these four languages, Cham is spoken by the largest number of people in Cambodia, followed by Jarai.
The Cham Language
Cham is the language of the Cham people of Southeast Asia, and formerly the language of the kingdom of Champa in central Vietnam. A member of the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian family, it is spoken by 100,000 people in Vietnam and up to 220,000 people in Cambodia. There are also small populations of speakers in Thailand and Malaysia.
Other Chamic languages are spoken in parts of Vietnam (Raglai, Rhade, Jarai, Chru, and H’roi) and on the Chinese island of Hainan (Tsat). Cham is related to the Malayo-Polynesian languages of Indonesia, Malaysia, Madagascar, and the Philippines. It once had a much wider extent and possibly much larger number of speakers, as it was the primary language of the Champa empire.
Prior to 1975, there were only about 100,000 speakers of Western Cham. The term Western Cham is used to distinguish between the Cham languages spoken in Cambodia and the Eastern Cham languages spoken in the coastal areas of central Vietnam. Western Cham is written using an Arabic script, or, since the late 1960s and the early 1970s, in a Romanized script devised by Protestant missionaries. The traditional Cham script, based on an Indian script, is still known and used by the Eastern Cham in Vietnam, but it has been lost by the Western Cham.
Like the Khmer language, the Cham language is also non-tonal. Words may contain one, two, or three syllables. Cham contains much linguistic borrowing from Arabic, Malay, and Khmer. The normal word order is subject-verb-object, and, as in Khmer, modifying adjectives follow the nouns that they modify. Most Cham in Cambodia are bilingual, speaking both Cham and Khmer, and many also know Arabic and Malay.
The Jarai Language
The Jarai language is a Malayo-Polynesian language spoken by the Jarai people of Vietnam and Cambodia. The speakers of Jarai number approximately 335,000. They are the largest of the upland ethnic groups of Vietnam's Central Highlands known as Degar or Montagnards.
The Jarai language belongs to the Chamic subgroup of the Malayo-Polynesian languages, and is thus related to the Cham language of Cambodia and central Vietnam. A number of Jarai also live in the United States, having resettled there following the Vietnam War.
Influenced by the surrounding Mon–Khmer languages, words of the various Chamic languages of Southeast Asia, including Jarai, have become disyllabic, with the stress on the second syllable. Additionally, Jarai has further evolved in the pattern of Mon–Khmer, losing almost all vowel distinction in the initial syllable. While trisyllabic words do exist, they are mostly all loanwords.
The Rade Language
The Rade (Rhade) language is a Malayo-Polynesian language spoken mainly in southern Vietnam, although there are also a number of speakers in Cambodia. Like Jarai, Rade is a close relative of the Cham language, with several thousand speakers in the northeastern region of Cambodia. Both Rade and Jarai are written in Romanized scripts based on the Vietnamese alphabet.
Rade has a rich oral tradition which includes many epic tales that have been transcribed and published.
The Malay Language
Although the Malay language is not native to Cambodia, there are several thousand people in the country that speak it as either a first or second language.
Like Cham, Malay is a major language of the Austronesian family. It is the national language of Brunei, Malaysia, and Indonesia and it is one of four official languages of Singapore. It is spoken natively by 40 million people across the Malacca Strait, including the coasts of the Malay Peninsula of Malaysia and the eastern coast of Sumatra in Indonesia, and has been established as a native language of part of western coastal Sarawak and West Kalimantan in Borneo. The total number of speakers of the language is more than 215 million.
Standard Malay, also called Court Malay, was the literary standard of the pre-colonial Malacca and Johor Sultanates, and so the language is sometimes called Malacca, Johor, or Riau Malay (or various combinations of those names) to distinguish it from the various other Malayan languages.
The history of the Malay language can be divided into five periods: Old Malay, the Transitional Period, the Malacca Period (Classical Malay), Late Modern Malay, and modern Malay. It is not clear that Old Malay was actually the ancestor of Classical Malay, but this is thought to be quite possible the earliest surviving manuscript in Malay is the Tanjong Tanah Law in post-Pallava characters. This 14th-century pre-Islamic legal text was produced in the Adityavarman era (1345–1377) of the Dharmasraya Kingdom, a Hindu-Buddhist kingdom that arose after the end of Srivijayan rule in Sumatra. The laws were for the Kerinci people who today still live in the highlands of Sumatra.
The Hill Tribes in Cambodia
Among the many minority groups who live in Cambodia are the various hill tribes who have called this region home for hundreds, if not thousands of years. These groups, which account for approximately 2 percent of the Cambodian population, are not ethnic Khmer, as are the vast majority of Cambodians, and thus speak a different language than their lowland counterparts..
The hill tribes of Cambodia were originally called phnong or samre, meaning savage. However, the Cambodian government began calling them Khmer Loeu (Highland Khmer) in the 1960s, apparently to create unity among the highland tribal groups and the lowland Khmer. Most hill groups come from a very different cultural background than lowland Cambodians, and most have different languages, customs, survival strategies, religions, and appearances.
The Khmer Loeu hill tribes, which include thirteen distinct minority groups, live in remote highland areas in the plateaus and mountainous areas on the edges of Cambodia. Members of these tribes live without regard to country borders, often in settlements that span both Cambodia and the neighboring countries of Laos and/or Vietnam. This is made possible by the isolation and ruggedness of the terrain, making political boundaries difficult to control. Through the centuries, tribes have mostly managed to avoid contact with lowlanders and to travel fairly freely across political boundaries.
During the 1960s, the Cambodian government sent the army to the hill tribes in an attempt to teach them the Khmer language and culture. Their goal? To assimilate (absorb) these tribes into Cambodian society. Many tribes-people, however, resented these efforts.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Communist Khmer Rouge were able to recruit a number of young tribesmen to their cause. The illiterate tribal youth, unfamiliar with any element of civilization, became the prototype (model) of the Khmer Rouge army. Like other Cambodians, tribe members were forced to abandon their traditional religious rituals, customs, and activities.
In 1978, the Vietnamese pushed the Khmer Rouge from power in Cambodia. Today, most tribe members live as they did before the Democratic Kampuchea years of the late 1970s. As of the late 2000s, the government no longer tries to teach the Cambodian language and culture to the hill tribes. Instead, the government claims that tribal languages and customs will continue to be respected.