Khmer
Cambodian ភាសាខ្មែរ
Pronunciation	IPA: [pʰiːəsaː kʰmaːe]
Spoken in	Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, USA, France, Australia
Ethnicity	Khmer
Native speakers	15.0 million  (2006) 1 million L2 speakers
Language family	Austro-Asiatic Nuclear Mon–Khmer? Khmero-Vietic? Khmero-Bahnaric? Khmer
Writing system	Khmer script (abugida)
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

This article contains Khmer text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Khmer script.

Khmer (ភាសាខ្មែរ, IPA: [pʰiːəsaː kʰmaːe]; or more formally, ខេមរភាសា, IPA: [kʰeɛmaʔraʔ pʰiːəsaː]), or Cambodian, is the language of the Khmer people and the official language of Cambodia. It is the second most widely spoken Austroasiatic language (after Vietnamese), with speakers in the tens of millions. Khmer has been considerably influenced by Sanskrit and Pali, especially in the royal and religious registers, through the vehicles 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.^[1] The Khmer language has influenced, and also been influenced by, Thai, Lao, Vietnamese and Cham, all of which, due to geographical proximity and long-term cultural contact, form a sprachbund in peninsular Southeast Asia.^[2]

The Khmer language is written with an abugida known in Khmer as âksâr khmêr (អក្សរខ្មែរ IPA: [ʔɑːksɑː kʰmaːe]). Khmer differs from neighboring languages such as Thai, Lao and Vietnamese in that it is not a tonal language.

The main dialects, all mutually intelligible, are:

• Battambang, spoken in northern Cambodia.
• Phnom Penh, the capital dialect and is also spoken in surrounding provinces.
• Northern Khmer, also known as Khmer Surin, spoken by ethnic Khmer native to Northeast Thailand
• Khmer Krom or Southern Khmer, spoken by the indigenous Khmer population of the Mekong Delta.
• Cardamom Khmer, an archaic form spoken by a small population in the Cardamom Mountains of western Cambodia and eastern Central Thailand^[3][4]

History[link]

A stone carved in Middle Khmer

Linguistic study of the Khmer language divides its history into four periods one of which, the Old Khmer period, is subdivided into pre-Angkorian and Angkorian.^[5] Pre-Angkorian Khmer, the language after its divergence from Proto-Mon–Khmer until the ninth century, is only known from words and phrases in Sanskrit texts of the era. Old Khmer (or Angkorian Khmer) is the language as it was spoken in the Khmer Empire from the 9th century until the weakening of the empire sometime in the 13th century. Old Khmer is attested by many primary sources and has been studied in depth by a few scholars, most notably Saveros Pou, Phillip Jenner and Heinz-Jürgen Pinnow. Following the end of the Khmer Empire the language lost the standardizing influence of being the language of government and accordingly underwent a turbulent period of change in morphology, phonology and lexicon. The language of this transition period, from about the 14th to 18th centuries, is referred to as Middle Khmer and saw borrowing from Thai, Lao and, to a lesser extent, Vietnamese. The changes during this period are so profound that the rules of Modern Khmer can not be applied to correctly understand Old Khmer. The language became recognizable as Modern Khmer, spoken from the 19th century till today.^[5]

The following table shows the conventionally accepted historical stages of Khmer.^[6]

A wax sculpture of Chuon Nath, the conservator of the modern Khmer language, at the Cambodian Cultural Village

Just as modern Khmer was emerging from the transitional period represented by Middle Khmer, Cambodia fell under the influence of French colonialism. In 1887 Cambodia was fully integrated into French Indochina which brought in a French-speaking aristocracy. This led to French becoming the language of higher education and the intellectual class. Many native scholars in the early 20th century, led by a monk named Chuon Nath, resisted the French influence on their language and championed Khmerization, using Khmer roots (and Pali and Sanskrit) to coin new words for modern ideas, instead of French. Nath cultivated modern Khmer-language identity and culture, overseeing the translation of the entire Pali Buddhist canon into Khmer and creating the modern Khmer language dictionary that is still in use today, thereby ensuring that Khmer would survive, and indeed flourish, during the French colonial period.

Khmer is classified as a member of the Eastern branch of the Mon–Khmer language family, itself a subdivision of the larger Austroasiatic language group, which has representatives in a large swath of land from Northeast India down through Southeast Asia to the Malay Peninsula and its islands. As such, its closest relatives are the languages of the Pearic, Bahnaric, and Katuic families spoken by the hill tribes of the region.^[7] The Vietic languages have also been classified as belonging to this family.

Phonology[link]

Khmer language
Khmer language
Khmer phonology Khmer grammar Khmer alphabet Khmer numerals Khmer literature
Dialects
Northern Khmer Western Khmer
v t e

The phonological system described here is the inventory of sounds of the spoken language, not how they are written in the Khmer alphabet.^[8]

Consonants[link]

Khmer is frequently described as having aspirated stops. However, these may be analyzed as consonant clusters, /ph, th, ch, kh/, as infixes can occur between the stop and the aspiration (phem, p<an>hem), or as non-distinctive phonetic detail in other consonant clusters, such as the khm in Khmer.^[10][11] [b] and [d] are occasional allophones of the implosives.

In addition, the consonants /f/, /ʃ/, /z/ and /ɡ/ may occasionally occur in recent loan words in the speech of Cambodians familiar with French and other languages. These non-native sounds are not represented in the Khmer script, although combinations of letters otherwise unpronounceable are used to represent them when necessary. In the speech of those who are not bilingual, these sounds are approximated with natively occurring phonemes:

Vowel nuclei[link]

Various researchers have proposed slightly different analyses of the vowels. This may be in part because political centralization has not yet been achieved, so standard Khmer does not prevail throughout Cambodia. Additionally, the Cambodian Civil War resulted in massive internal population upheaval. As such, many speakers of even the same community may have different phonological inventories.^[12] Two proposals follow. The first is Huffman's analysis of Standard Khmer, and the second is Wayland's analysis of Battambang Khmer, the dialect upon which the standard is based.

The precise number and the phonetic value of vowel nuclei vary from dialect to dialect. Short and long vowels of equal quality are distinguished solely by duration.

Syllable structure[link]

Khmer words are predominantly either monosyllabic or sesquisyllabic, with stress falling on the final syllable.^[14] There are 85 possible clusters of two consonants at the beginning of syllables and two three-consonant clusters with phonetic alterations as shown below:

Syllables begin with one of these consonants or consonant clusters, followed by one of the vowel nuclei. The aspiration in some clusters is allophonic.^[11] When the vowel nucleus is short, there has to be a final consonant. /p, t, c, k, ʔ, m, n, ɲ, ŋ, l, h, j, ʋ/ can exist in a syllable coda, while /h/ and /ʋ/ approach [ç] and [w] respectively. The stops /p, t, c, k/ have no audible release when occurring as syllable finals.

The most common word structure in Khmer is a full syllable as described above, which may be preceded by an unstressed, "minor" syllable that has a consonant-vowel structure of CV-, CrV-, CVN- or CrVN- (N is any nasal in the Khmer inventory). The vowel in these preceding syllables is usually reduced in conversation to [ə], however in careful or formal speech and in television and radio, they are always clearly articulated.

Words with three or more syllables exist, particularly those pertaining to science, the arts, and religion. However, these words are loanwords, usually derived from Pali, Sanskrit, or more recently, French.

Suprasegmental features[link]

Tone and phonation[link]

Most Cambodian dialects are not tonal. However, the colloquial Phnom Penh dialect has developed a marginal, non-phonemic, tonal contrast (a level versus a peaking tone) to compensate for the elision of /r/.^[10]

Khmer once had a phonation distinction in its vowels, which was indicated in writing by choosing between two sets of letters for the preceding consonant according to the historical source of the phonation. However, phonation has been lost in all but the most archaic dialect of Khmer (Western Khmer).^[15] For example, Old Khmer distinguished voiced and unvoiced pairs as in *kaa vs *ɡaa. The vowels after voiced consonants became breathy voiced and diphthongized: *kaa, *ɡe̤a. When consonant voicing was lost, the distinction was maintained by the vowel: *kaa, *ke̤a, and later the phonation disappeared as well: [kaː], [kiə].^[10]

Prosody[link]

Stress[link]

Stress in Khmer is non-phonemic (does not distinguish different meanings) and thus is considered to depend entirely on syllable structure. Owing in part to the sesquisyllabic nature of Khmer, syllabic stress is also highly predictable. In native disyllabic words, the first syllable is always a minor syllable and the second syllable is stressed. Loan words and reduplications also tend to follow this pattern:

សំពត់	/sɑm 'poə̯̆t/	"type of sarong"
អំបោះ	/ɑm 'bɐ:h/	"broom"
ទូលាយ	/tu: 'liə̯j/	"spacious"

In words of more than two syllables, primary stress is always on the final syllable with secondary stress on every second syllable. Thus, in a three-syllable word, the first syllable exhibits secondary stress, while primary stress is on the third syllable:

រតនា	/ˌreə̯̆ʔ taʔ 'na:/	"gem, jewel, precious stone"
រដ្ធបាល	/ˌroə̯̆t tʰaʔ 'ba:l/	"caretaker of the government"
កម្ពុជា	/ˌkam puʔ 'ciə̯/	"Kampuchea"

Compound words of three syllables, however, follow the stress of the constituent words:

អំបិលម្ទេស	/ɑm ˌbɨl 'mte:h/	"a dry dipping powder of peppers and salt"
អន្ទាក់រូត	/ɑn ˌteə̯̆ʔ 'ru:t/	"a trap fashioned with a slip knot"
សំបុកចាប	/sɑm ˌbok 'ca:p/	"a kind of cookie" (lit. "bird's nest")

In a four-syllable word, the second syllable carries secondary stress and primary stress is on the fourth syllable:^[16]

សីមារេខា​	/səj ˌma: reə̯̆ʔ 'kʰa:/	"boundary line"
សកម្មភាព	/saʔ ˌkam meə̯̆ʔ 'pʰiə̯p/	"physical activity"
រណូងរណាង	/rɔ ˌno:ŋ rɔ 'na:ŋ/	"hasty, hastily, angrily" (an example of reduplication)

Words of five or more syllables are exceedingly rare in everyday conversation but do occur in academic, governmental, and religious contexts. These words are all derived from Sanskrit or Pali roots but follow Khmer pronunciation and stress patterns:^[16][17]

មេឃវាហន

/me: ˌkʰeə̯̆ʔ viə̯ ˌhaʔ 'naʔ/

"A name of Indra" (lit. from Sanskrit "having clouds for a vehicle")

Intonation[link]

As Khmer is primarily an analytic pro-drop language, intonation (non-phonemic pitch variation throughout clauses) oftentimes conveys semantic context. The intonation pattern of a typical Khmer declarative phrase is a steady rise throughout followed by an abrupt drop on the last syllable.^[16]

ខ្ញុំមិនចង់បានទេ

/↗kʰɲom mɨn caŋ baːn | ↘teː/

"I don't want it."

Other intonation contours signify a different type of phrase such as the "full doubt" interrogative, similar to "yes-no" questions in English or the exclamatory phrase. Full doubt interrogatives remain fairly even in tone throughout but rise sharply towards the end.

អ្នក់ចង់ទៅលេងសៀមរាបទេ

/↗nea? caŋ | ↗tɨw leːŋ siəm riəp | ꜛteː/

"Do you want to go to Siem Reap?"

Exclamatory phrases follow the typical steadily rising pattern, but rise sharply on the last syllable instead of falling.^[16]

សៀវភៅនេះថ្លៃណាស់

/↗siəw pʰɨw nih| ↗tʰlaj | ꜛnah/

"This book is expensive!"

Grammar[link]

Khmer is generally a subject–verb–object (SVO) language with prepositions.^[18] Although primarily an isolating language, lexical derivation by means of prefixes and infixes is common but not always productive in the modern language.^[19]

Adjectives and Adverbs[link]

Adjectives, demonstratives and numerals follow the noun they modify. Adverbs likewise follow the verb. Morphologically, adjectives and adverbs are not distinguished with many words often serving either function. Similar to other languages of the region, intensity can be expressed by reduplication.

ស្រីស្អាតនោះ /srəj sʔaːt nuh/ (girl pretty that) = that pretty girl
ស្រីស្អាតស្អាត /srəj sʔaːt sʔaːt/ (girl pretty pretty) = a very pretty girl

As Khmer sentences rarely use a copula, adjectives are also employed as verbs. Comparatives are formed by the use of ciəng: "A X ciəng B" (A is more X than B). The most common way to express the idea of superlatives is the construction "A X ciəng kee" (A is X-est of all).

Nouns[link]

The noun has no grammatical gender or singular/plural distinction and is uninflected. Technically there are no articles, but indefiniteness is often expressed by the word for "one" following the noun. Plurality can be marked by postnominal particles, numerals, or reduplicating the adjective, which, although similar to intensification, is usually not ambiguous due to context.

ឆ្កែធំ /cʰkae tʰom/ (dog large) = large dog

ឆ្កែធំធំ /cʰkae tʰom tʰom/ (dog large large) = a very large dog or large dogs

ឆ្កែធំណាស់ /cʰkae tʰom nah/ (dog large very) = very large dog

ឆ្កែពីរ /cʰkae piː/ (dog two) = two dogs

Classifying particles for use between numerals and nouns exist although are not always obligatory as in, for example, Thai. Pronouns are subject to a complicated system of social register, the choice of pronoun depending on the perceived relationships between speaker, audience and referent (see Social registers below). Kinship terms, nicknames and proper names are often used as pronouns (including for the first person) among intimates. Frequently, subject pronouns are dropped in colloquial conversation.

Verbs[link]

As is typical of most East Asian languages,^[20] the verb does not inflect at all; tense and aspect can be shown by particles and adverbs or understood by context. Most commonly, time words such as "yesterday", "earlier", "tomorrow", indicate tense when not inferrable from context. There is no participle form. The gerund is formed by using /kəmpɔːŋ/: "A /kəmpɔːŋ/ V" (A is in the process of V). Serial verb construction is quite common. Negation is achieved by putting /min/ before them and /teː/ at the end of the sentence or clause. In normal speech verbs can also be negated without the need for an ending particle by putting /ʔɐt/ before them.

ខ្ញុំជឿ /kʰɲom cɨə/ – I believe

ខ្ញុំមិនជឿទេ /kʰɲom min cɨə teː/ – I don't believe

ខ្ញុំ​ឥត​ជឿ /kʰɲom ʔɐt cɨə/ – I don't believe

Dialects[link]

Dialects are sometimes quite marked. Notable variations are found in speakers from Phnom Penh (which is the capital city), the rural Battambang area, the areas of Northeast Thailand adjacent to Cambodia such as Surin province, the Cardamom Mountains, and in southern Vietnam.^[21] The dialects form a continuum running roughly north to south. Standard Cambodian Khmer is mutually intelligible with the others but a Khmer Krom speaker from Vietnam, for instance, may have great difficulty communicating with a Khmer native to Sisaket Province in Thailand.

The following is a classification scheme showing the development of the modern Khmer dialects.^[6][22]

• Middle Khmer
  • Cardamom (Western) Khmer
  • Central Khmer
    • Surin (Northern) Khmer
    • Standard Khmer and related dialects (including Khmer Krom)

Northern Khmer (called Khmer Surin in Khmer) refers to the dialects spoken by approximately 1.4 million Khmers native to the provinces of present-day Northeast Thailand. After the fall of the Khmer Empire in the early 15th century, the Dongrek Mountains served as a natural border leaving the Khmer north of the mountains under the sphere of influence of Lan Xang. The conquests of Cambodia by Naresuan the Great for Ayutthaya furthered the political and economic isolation from Cambodia proper leading to a dialect that developed relatively independently from the mid-point of the Middle Khmer period.^[23] This has resulted in a distinct accent influenced by the surrounding tonal languages, Lao and Thai, lexical differences and phonemic differences in both vowels and distribution of consonants. Additionally, syllable-final /r/, which has become silent in other dialects of Khmer, is still pronounced in Northern Khmer. Some linguists classify Northern Khmer as a separate, but closely related language rather than a dialect.^[24][25]

Western Khmer, also called Cardamom Khmer or Chanthaburi Khmer, spoken by a small, isolated population in the Cardamom mountain range extending from Cambodia into Thailand, although little studied, is unique in that it maintains a definite system of vocal register that has all but disappeared in other dialects of modern Khmer.^[15]

A notable characteristic of Phnom Penh casual speech is merging or complete elision of syllables, considered by speakers from other regions as a "relaxed" pronunciation. For instance, "Phnom Penh" will sometimes be shortened to "m'Penh". Another characteristic of Phnom Penh speech is observed in words with an "r" either as an initial consonant or as the second member of a consonant cluster (as in the English word "bread"). The "r", trilled or flapped in other dialects, is either pronounced as an uvular trill or not pronounced at all. This alters the quality of any preceding consonant causing a harder, more emphasized pronunciation. Another unique result is that the syllable is spoken with a low-rising or "dipping" tone much like the "hỏi" tone in Vietnamese. For example, some people pronounce /trəj/ (meaning "fish") as /təj/, the "r" is dropped and the vowel begins by dipping much lower in tone than standard speech and then rises, effectively doubling its length. Another example is the word /riən/ ("study, learn"). It is pronounced /ʀiən/, with the "uvular r" and the same intonation described above.^[26]

Social registers[link]

Khmer employs a system of registers in which the speaker must always be conscious of the social status of the person spoken to. The different registers, which include those used for common speech, polite speech, speaking to or about royals and speaking to or about monks, employ alternate verbs, names of body parts and pronouns. This results in what appears to foreigners as separate languages and, in fact, isolated villagers often are unsure how to speak with royals and royals raised completely within the court do not feel comfortable speaking the common register. Another result is that the pronominal system is complex and full of honorific variations.

As an example, the word for "to eat" used between intimates or in reference to animals is /siː/. Used in polite reference to commoners, it's /ɲam/. When used of those of higher social status, it's /pisa/ or /tɔtuəl tiən/. For monks the word is /cʰan/ and for royals, /saoj/.^[1]

Writing system[link]

An example of modern Khmer script at the Cambodian Embassy in Berlin

Khmer is written with the Khmer script, an abugida developed from the Pallava script of India before the 7th century when the first known inscription appeared.^[27] Written left-to-right with vowel signs that can be placed after, before, above or below the consonant they follow, the Khmer script is similar in appearance and usage to Thai and Lao, both of which were based on the Khmer system. The Khmer script is also distantly related to the Mon script, the ancestor of the modern Burmese script.^[27] Khmer numerals, which were inherited from Indian numerals, are used more widely than Hindu-Arabic numerals. Within Cambodia, literacy in the Khmer alphabet is estimated at 77.6%.^[28]

In addition to its use for the Khmer language, the Khmer script is also used within Cambodia to write the Pali of the Buddhist liturgy and transcribe hill tribe languages that have no writing system of their own.^[8] Khmer script is also used in Thailand and Laos for folk magic formulas and tattooing.

Numbers[link]

The numbers^[19] are:

See also[link]

	Cambodia portal
	Languages portal

Khmer language edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Khmer language

• Literature of Cambodia

References and notes[link]

Further reading[link]

External links[link]

• SEAlang Project: Mon–Khmer languages. The Khmeric Branch
• Khmer Swadesh vocabulary list (from Wiktionary's Swadesh-list appendix)
• Learn Khmer Interactively
• Ethnologue entry on Khmer
• Dictionary and SpellChecker open sourced and collaborative project based on Chuon Nath Khmer Dictionary
• How to install Khmer script on a Windows 7 computer
• How to install Khmer script on a Windows XP computer
• Khmer at UCLA Language Materials project
• Online Khmer & English dictionary
• Khmer Online Dictionaries
• A small primer on the Khmer Language
• USA Foreign Service Institute (FSI) Cambodian basic course
• Khmer audio lessons at Wikiotics