Khmer language

Khmer is a member of the Austroasiatic language family, the autochthonous 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. Diffloth places Khmer in an eastern branch of the Mon-Khmer languages. 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 equidistant from the other 12 branches of the family. ==Geographic distribution and dialects==

Khmer is spoken by some 13 million people in Cambodia, where it is the official language. It is also a second language for most of the minority groups and indigenous hill tribes there. Additionally there are a million speakers of Khmer native to southern Vietnam (1999 census) and 1.4 million in northeast Thailand (2006). Khmer dialects, although mutually intelligible, are sometimes quite marked. Notable variations are found in speakers from Phnom Penh (Cambodia's capital city), the rural Battambang area, the areas of Northeast Thailand adjacent to Cambodia such as Surin province, the Cardamom Mountains, and southern Vietnam. 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 of Sisaket Province in Thailand. The following is a classification scheme showing the development of the modern Khmer dialects. • Middle Khmer • Cardamom (Western) Khmer • Central Khmer • Surin (Northern) Khmer • Standard Khmer and related dialects (including Khmer Krom) Standard Khmer, or Central Khmer, the language as taught in Cambodian schools and used by the media, is based on the dialect spoken throughout the Central Plain, 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. Syllable-final , 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. Western Khmer, also called Cardamom Khmer or Chanthaburi Khmer, is spoken by a very small, isolated population in the Cardamom mountain range extending from western Cambodia into eastern Central Thailand. Although little studied, this variety is unique in that it maintains a definite system of vocal register that has all but disappeared in other dialects of modern Khmer. 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 ('fish') as : the 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 ('study'), which is pronounced , with the uvular "r" and the same intonation described above. Consequently, very little research has been published regarding this dialect. It has been generally influenced by Vietnamese for three centuries and accordingly displays a pronounced accent, tendency toward monosyllabic words and lexical differences from Standard Khmer. Khmer Khe is spoken in the Se San, Srepok and Sekong river valleys of Sesan and Siem Pang districts in Stung Treng Province. Following the decline of Angkor, the Khmer abandoned their northern territories, which the Lao then settled. In the 17th century, Chey Chetha XI led a Khmer force into Stung Treng to retake the area. The Khmer Khe living in this area of Stung Treng in modern times are presumed to be the descendants of this group. Their dialect is thought to resemble that of pre-modern Siem Reap. ==Historical periods==

Linguistic study of the Khmer language divides its history into three periods, one of which, the Old Khmer period, is subdivided into pre-Angkorian and Angkorian. Pre-Angkorian Khmer is the Old Khmer language from 600 through 800 CE. Angkorian Khmer is the language as it was spoken in the Khmer Empire from the 9th century until the 13th century. The following centuries saw changes 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 borrowings from Thai in the literary register. Thailand, which had for centuries claimed suzerainty over Cambodia and controlled succession to the Cambodian throne, began losing its influence on the language. 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. By 1907, the French had wrested over half of modern-day Cambodia, including the north and northwest where Thai had been the prestige language, back from Thai control and reintegrated it into the country. Opponents, led by Keng Vannsak, who embraced "total Khmerization" by denouncing the reversion to classical languages and favoring the use of contemporary colloquial Khmer for neologisms, and Ieu Koeus, who favored borrowing from Thai, were also influential. Koeus later joined the Cultural Committee and supported Nath. Nath's views and prolific work won out and he is credited with cultivating modern Khmer-language identity and culture, overseeing the translation of the entire Pali Buddhist canon into Khmer. He also created the modern Khmer language dictionary that is still in use today, helping preserve Khmer during the French colonial period. ==Phonology==

The phonological system described here is the inventory of sounds of the standard spoken language, represented using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Consonants The voiceless plosives may occur with or without aspiration (as vs. , etc.); this difference is contrastive before a vowel. However, the aspirated sounds in that position may be analyzed as sequences of two phonemes: . This analysis is supported by the fact that infixes can be inserted between the stop and the aspiration; for example ('big') becomes ('size') with a nominalizing infix. When one of these plosives occurs initially before another consonant, aspiration is no longer contrastive and can be regarded as mere phonetic detail: slight aspiration is expected when the following consonant is not one of (or if the initial plosive is ). The voiced plosives are pronounced as implosives by most speakers, but this feature is weak in educated speech, where they become . In syllable-final position, and approach and respectively. The stops are unaspirated and have no audible release when occurring as syllable finals. The description below follows Huffman (1970). In addition, some diphthongs and triphthongs are analyzed as a vowel nucleus plus a semivowel ( or ) coda because they cannot be followed by a final consonant. These include: (with short monophthongs) , , , , ; (with long monophthongs) , ; (with long diphthongs) , , , , and . The independent vowels are a feature of the Khmer script: they are the vowel graphemes that can exist without a preceding or trailing written consonant. The independent vowels may be used as monosyllabic words, or as the initial syllables in longer words. Khmer words as written never begin with regular vowels; they can, however, begin with independent vowels. Example: ឰដ៏, ឧទាហរណ៍, ឧត្តម, ឱកាស...។ Syllable structure A Khmer syllable begins with a single consonant, or else with a cluster of two, or rarely three, consonants. The only possible clusters of three consonants at the start of a syllable are , and (with aspirated consonants analyzed as two-consonant sequences) . There are 85 possible two-consonant clusters (including [pʰ] etc. analyzed as etc.). All the clusters are shown in the following table, phonetically, i.e. superscript can mark either contrastive or non-contrastive aspiration (see above). Slight vowel epenthesis occurs in the clusters consisting of a plosive followed by , in those beginning , and in the cluster . A minor syllable (unstressed syllable preceding the main syllable of a word) has a structure of CV-, CrV-, CVN- or CrVN- (where C is a consonant, V a vowel, and N a nasal consonant). The vowels in such syllables are usually short; in conversation they may be reduced to , although in careful or formal speech, including on television and radio, they are clearly articulated. An example of such a word is mɔnuh, mɔnɨh, mĕəʾnuh ('person'), pronounced , or more casually . Stress Stress in Khmer falls on the final syllable of a word. Because of this predictable pattern, stress is non-phonemic in Khmer (it does not distinguish different meanings). Primary stress falls on the final syllable, with secondary stress on every second syllable from the end. Thus in a three-syllable word, the first syllable has secondary stress; in a four-syllable word, the second syllable has secondary stress; in a five-syllable word, the first and third syllables have secondary stress, and so on. Compounds, however, preserve the stress patterns of the constituent words. Thus , the name of a kind of cookie (literally 'bird's nest'), is pronounced , with secondary stress on the second rather than the first syllable, because it is composed of the words ('nest') and ('bird'). The intonation pattern of a typical Khmer declarative phrase is a steady rise throughout followed by an abrupt drop on the last syllable. :       ('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. Full doubt interrogatives remain fairly even in tone throughout, but rise sharply towards the end. :       ('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. :       ('this book is expensive!') ==Grammar==

Khmer is primarily an analytic language with no inflection. Syntactic relations are mainly determined by word order. Old and Middle Khmer used particles to mark grammatical categories and many of these have survived in Modern Khmer but are used sparingly, mostly in literary or formal language. Topic-Comment constructions are common and the language is generally head-initial (modifiers follow the words they modify). Some grammatical processes are still not fully understood by western scholars. For example, it is not clear if certain features of Khmer grammar, such as actor nominalization, should be treated as a morphological process or a purely syntactic device, Henri Maspero, an early scholar of Khmer, claimed the language had no parts of speech, John Haiman, on the other hand, identifies "a couple dozen" parts of speech in Khmer with the caveat that Khmer words have the freedom to perform a variety of syntactic functions depending on such factors as word order, relevant particles, location within a clause, intonation and context. Khmer morphology is evidence of a historical process through which the language was, at some point in the past, changed from being an agglutinative language to adopting an isolating typology. Affixed forms are lexicalized and cannot be used productively to form new words. Intensity is also expressed syntactically, similar to other languages of the region, by reduplication or with the use of intensifiers. Khmer verbs do not inflect at all; tense, aspect and mood can be expressed using auxiliary verbs, particles (such as , placed before a verb to express continuous aspect) and adverbs (such as "yesterday", "earlier", "tomorrow"), or may be understood from context. Serial verb construction is quite common. Khmer syntax is very analytic. Relationships between words and phrases are signified primarily by word order supplemented with auxiliary verbs and, particularly in formal and literary registers, grammatical marking particles. The topic and subject are noun phrases, predicates are verb phrases and another noun phrase acting as an object or verbal attribute often follows the predicate. Relative clauses can be introduced by ("that") but, similar to coordinate clauses, often simply follow the main clause. For example, both phrases below can mean "the hospital bed that has wheels". {{interlinear|ipa1=yes|italics1=no|/krɛː pɛːt miən kɑŋ ruɲ/| bed hospital have wheel {to push}| "the hospital bed that has wheels"}} {{interlinear|ipa1=yes|italics1=no|/krɛː pɛːt dael miən kɑŋ ruɲ/|bed hospital REL have wheel {to push}|"the hospital bed that has wheels"}} Relative clauses are more likely to be introduced with if they do not immediately follow the head noun. Khmer subordinate conjunctions always precede a subordinate clause. Subordinate conjunctions include words such as ("because"), ("seems as if") and ("in order to"). ==Numerals==

Counting in Khmer is based on a biquinary system: the numbers from 6 to 9 have the form "five one", "five two", etc. The words for multiples of ten from 30 to 90 are not related to the basic Khmer numbers, but are Chinese in origin, and probably came to Khmer via Thai. Khmer numerals, which were inherited directly from Indian numerals, are used more widely than Western numerals, which like Khmer numerals were inherited from Indian, but first passed through the Arabic numerals before reaching the west. The principal number words are listed in the following table, which gives Western and Khmer digits, Khmer spelling and IPA transcription. Ordinal numbers are formed by placing the particle before the corresponding cardinal number. ==Social registers==

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. As an example, the word for "to eat" used between intimates or in reference to animals is . Used in polite reference to commoners, it is . When used of those of higher social status, it is or . For monks the word is and for royals, . Another result is that the pronominal system is complex and full of honorific variations, just a few of which are shown in the table below. ==Writing system==

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. 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–Burmese script. Consonant symbols in Khmer are divided into two groups, or series. The first series carries the inherent vowel while the second series carries the inherent vowel . The Khmer names of the series, ('voiceless') and ('voiced'), respectively, indicate that the second series consonants were used to represent the voiced phonemes of Old Khmer. As the voicing of stops was lost, however, the contrast shifted to the phonation of the attached vowels, which, in turn, evolved into a simple difference of vowel quality, often by diphthongization. This process has resulted in the Khmer alphabet having two symbols for most consonant phonemes and each vowel symbol having two possible readings, depending on the series of the initial consonant: ==Examples==

The following text is from Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. ==See also==