Khmer 
Introduction |
Khmer (also known as Cambodian) belongs to the Mon-Khmer branch of the Austro-Asiatic language family whose members are scattered over mainland Southeast Asia. The language is attested from the earliest periods by numerous inscriptions, and later by extensive writings on palm leaf, including the Khmer version of the Ramayana, a grand Sanskrit epic of 24,000 verses about Rama, the Hindu incarnation of God. Sanskrit and Pali have had considerable influence on Khmer, through Buddhism and Hinduism. However, as a consequence of Khmer nationalism that emerged in the 1960s, there was a movement to expunge Sanskrit and Pali words from the lexicon. The Khmer Rouge regime also attempted to expunge certain linguistic features from the language that was considered politically incorrect. |
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Khmer is spoken as a first or second language by 6 million people, or 90% of the population of Cambodia. It is also spoken by large groups of people in Vietnam and Thailand, with smaller communities in the US, France, and Laos (Ethnologue). As the official language of Cambodia, Khmer is used in the media, government administration, at all levels of education, and in most informal and formal contexts. Click on the Modern Language Association Interactive Language Map to find out where Khmer is spoken in the United States. |
Structure
Sound System |
Modern Standard Khmer is based on the Phnom Penh dialect. Khmer is an extremely vowel-rich language with a vowel inventory consisting of twenty-five to twenty-seven short and long vowels, depending on the dialect. It has seventeen to twenty-one consonants. Unlike Vietnamese, Khmer is not a tonal language. Stress tends to fall on the final syllable. Khmer allows consonant clusters at the beginning but not at the end of words. Not all consonants can occur in word- final position. |
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Like other languages of the Austro-Asiatic family, Khmer is an analytic language, i.e., it does not use prefixes and suffixes to express grammatical relations. Instead, it uses syntactic constructions to express what Indo-European languages express through prefixes and suffixes. Grammatical relations are signaled by word order with the help of various particles. Noun phrase Pronouns Verb phrase Word order |
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Khmer has borrowed many words from Sankrit. With the advent of Theravada Buddhism at the beginning of the fifteenth century, Khmer began to borrow Pali words. During the period of French domination, many French words were borrowed into the language and have become a part of both the spoken language and technical/scientific terminology. Colloquial Khmer also has some Chinese and Vietnamese loanwords.
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Writing |
The Khmer script derived from a variant of the Brahmi script used to write Sanskrit, Hindi, and other Ind0-Aryan languages. It is syllabic alphabet in which each consonant has two forms, one with an inherent vowel /a/ (first series) and one with an inherent vowel /o/ (second series). Vowels are indicated by using either separate letters or diacritics, which are written above, below, in front of, after or around the consonants. The pronunciation of the vowels depends on whether a consonant they are attached to belongs to the first or the second series. All consonants have a subscript form that is used to write the second consonant of a cluster. There are no spaces between words in Khmer. Spaces are used to indicate the end of a clause or sentence. Some efforts to standardize Khmer spelling have been attempted, but inconsistencies persist, and many words have more than one accepted spelling. Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Khmer. What strikes you most about this writing?
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Resources
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How difficult is it to learn Khmer? Since these languages are not taught at the Foreign Service Institute, they are not categorized for difficulty |
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