| Khmer | |
|---|---|
| Cambodian | |
| Pronunciation | IPA: [pʰiːəsaː kʰmaːe] |
| Native to | Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand |
| Ethnicity | Khmer, Northern Khmer |
Native speakers
|
16 million (2007)[1] |
Early forms
|
|
| Dialects |
Battambang
Phnom Penh
Khmer Krom (Southern Khmer)
Cardamom Khmer (Western Khmer)
|
| Khmer script (abugida) Khmer Braille |
|
| Official status | |
Official language in
|
Cambodia |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-1 | km |
| ISO 639-2 | khm |
| ISO 639-3 | Either: khm – Central Khmer kxm – Northern Khmer |
| Glottolog | khme1253[2]========================================================== |
Khmer /kmɛər/[3] or Cambodian(natively [pʰiːəsaː kʰmaːe], or more formally [kʰeɛmaʔraʔ pʰiːəsaː]) is the language of theKhmer people and the official language of Cambodia. With approximately 16 million speakers, it is the second most widely spokenAustroasiatic language (afterVietnamese). Khmer has been influenced considerably by Sanskritand Pali, especially in the royal and religious registers, through Hinduismand Buddhism. The more colloquial registers have influenced, and have been influenced by, Thai, Lao,Vietnamese, and Cham, all of which, due to geographical proximity and long-term cultural contact, form asprachbund in peninsular Southeast Asia.[4] It is also the earliest recorded and earliest written language of theMon–Khmer family, predating Monand by a significant margin Vietnamese,[5] due to Old Khmer being the language of the historical empires of Chenla, Angkor and, presumably, their earlier predecessor state, Funan.
The vast majority of Khmer speakers speak Central Khmer, the dialect of the central plain where the Khmer are most heavily concentrated. Within Cambodia, regional accents exist in remote areas but these are regarded varieties of Central Khmer. Two exceptions are the speech of the capital, Phnom Penh, and that of the Khmer Khe in Stung Treng province, both of which differ sufficiently enough from Central Khmer to be considered separate dialects of Khmer. Outside of Cambodia, three distinct dialects are spoken by ethnic Khmers native to areas that were historically part of the Khmer Empire. The Northern Khmer dialect is spoken by over a million Khmers in the southern regions ofNortheast Thailand and is treated by some linguists as a separate language. Khmer Krom, or Southern Khmer, is the first language of the Khmer of Vietnamwhile the Khmer living in the remote Cardamom mountains speak a very conservative dialect that still displays features of the Middle Khmer language.
Khmer is primarily an analytic, isolating language. There are no inflections,conjugations or case endings. Instead, particles and auxiliary words are used to indicate grammatical relationships. General word order is subject–verb–object, andmodifiers follow the word they modify. Classifiers appear after numbers when used to count nouns, though not always so consistently as in languages like Chinese. In spoken Khmer, topic-comment structure is common and the perceived social relation between participants determines which sets of vocabulary, such as pronouns and honorifics, are proper.
Khmer differs from neighboring languages such as Thai, Burmese, Lao and Vietnamese in that it is not a tonal language. Words are stressed on the final syllable, hence many words conform to the typical Mon–Khmer pattern of a stressed syllable preceded by a minor syllable. The language has been written in the Khmer script, an abugida descended from the Brahmi script via the southern Indian Pallava script, since at least the seventh century. The script's form and use has evolved over the centuries; its modern features include subscripted versions of consonants used to write clusters and a division of consonants into two series with different inherent vowels. Approximately 79% of Cambodians are able to read Khmer.[6]
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