The Voice of Angkor: A History of the Khmer Language

The Voice of Angkor: A History of the Khmer Language

Chapter One: The Ancient Tongue: The Origins of the Khmer Language in the Mon-Khmer Family The Khmer language is the soul of the Cambodian nation, the vessel for its poetry, its history, and its identity. It is a language with a deep and ancient pedigree, one that stands apart from its most famous neighbors. Unlike Thai, Lao, and Vietnamese, with their complex system of tones where the pitch of a voice can change a word's meaning, the Khmer language is non-tonal. Its roots lie in a much older linguistic world. To trace the origins of the Khmer language is to uncover the story of the very first major group of people to settle and civilize this part of the world: the speakers of the great Austroasiatic languages. The Great Austroasiatic Family The Khmer language belongs to a vast and ancient language family known as Austroasiatic, a group of some 150 related languages spoken across a huge arc of land stretching from eastern India all the way to Vietnam. The name itself means "Sout…