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Khmer ( ;Laurie Bauer, 2007, The Linguistics Student's Handbook, Edinburgh ខ្មែរ, UNGEGN: ) is an Austroasiatic language spoken natively by the Khmer people and is an official language and national language of Cambodia. The language is also widely spoken by Khmer people in Eastern Thailand and Isan, Thailand, as well as in the Southeastern and Mekong Delta regions of Vietnam.
Khmer has been influenced considerably by Sanskrit and Pali especially in the royal and religious registers, through Hinduism and Buddhism, due to Old Khmer being the language of the historical empires of Chenla and Angkorian Empire.
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 as 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 of Northeast Thailand and is treated by some linguists as a separate language. Khmer Krom, or Southern Khmer, is the first language of the Khmer Krom, while 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 , conjugations or grammatical case endings. Instead, particles and auxiliary words are used to indicate grammatical relationships. General word order is subject–verb–object, and modifiers follow the word they modify. Classifiers appear after numbers when used to count nouns, though not always so consistently as in languages like Chinese language. 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 Burmese language, Thai language, Lao language, 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 7th 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 .
Diffloth places Khmer in an eastern branch of the Mon-Khmer languages.Diffloth, Gérard (2005). "The contribution of linguistic palaeontology and Austroasiatic". in Laurent Sagart, Roger Blench and Alicia Sanchez-Mazas, eds. The Peopling of East Asia: Putting Together Archaeology, Linguistics and Genetics. 77–80. London: Routledge Curzon. In these classification schemes Khmer's closest genetic relatives are the Bahnaric and Pearic languages.Shorto, Harry L. edited by Sidwell, Paul, Cooper, Doug and Bauer, Christian (2006). A Mon–Khmer comparative dictionary. Canberra: Australian National University. Pacific Linguistics. 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.
Khmer , 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.Sidwell, Paul (2009). Classifying the Austroasiatic languages: history and state of the art. LINCOM studies in Asian linguistics, 76. Munich: Lincom Europa.
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, a region encompassed by the northwest and central provinces.
Northern Khmer (called in Khmer) refers to the dialects spoken by many in several border 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 the Kingdom of Lan Xang. The conquests of Cambodia by Naresuan the Great for Ayutthaya furthered their political and economic isolation from Cambodia proper, leading to a dialect that developed relatively independently from the midpoint of the Middle Khmer period.
This has resulted in a distinct accent influenced by the surrounding tonal languages Isan language and Thai language, 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. Phonetic variation of final trill and final palatals in Khmer dialects of Thailand Suwilai, Premsrirat; Mahidol University; Mon-Khmer Studies 24:1–26; pg 1
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.
Phnom Penh Khmer is spoken in the capital and surrounding areas. This dialect is characterized by merging or complete elision of syllables, which speakers from other regions consider a "relaxed" pronunciation. For instance, "Phnom Penh" is sometimes 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", Alveolar trill or Alveolar tap in other dialects, is either pronounced as a 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 ត្រី ('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 រៀន ('study'), which is pronounced , with the uvular "r" and the same intonation described above.
Khmer Krom or Southern Khmer is spoken by the indigenous Khmer population of the Mekong Delta, formerly controlled by the Khmer Empire but part of Vietnam since 1698. Khmers are persecuted by the Vietnamese government for using their native language and, since the 1950s, have been forced to take Vietnamese names.Unrepresented Peoples and Nations Organization Khmer Krom Profile Retrieved 19 June 2012 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.Thach, Ngoc Minh. Monosyllablization in Kiengiang Khmer. University of Ho Chi Minh City.
Khmer Khe is spoken in the Se San, Srepok River and Kong River river valleys of Sesan District 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.
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. Modern Khmer is dated from the 19th century to today.
The following table shows the conventionally accepted historical stages of Khmer.
| + Historical Stages of Khmer ! c=01 | Historical stage ! c=02 | Date |
| Pre- or Proto-Khmer | Before 600 CE | |
| Pre-Angkorian Old Khmer | 600–800 | |
| Angkorian Old Khmer | 800 to mid-14th century | |
| Middle Khmer | Mid-14th century to 18th century | |
| Modern Khmer | 1800–present |
Just as modern Khmer was emerging from the transitional period represented by Middle Khmer, Cambodia fell under the influence of France colonialism. 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 language-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.
Many native scholars in the early 20th century, led by a monk named Chuon Nath, resisted the French and Thai influences on their language. Forming the government sponsored Cultural Committee to define and standardize the modern language, they championed Khmerization, purging of foreign elements, reviving affixation, and the use of Old Khmer roots and historical Pali and Sanskrit to coin new words for modern ideas. 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.
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 : . This analysis is supported by the fact that 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 . International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, OUP 2003, p. 356.
In syllable-final position, and approach and respectively. The stops are unaspirated and have no audible release when occurring as syllable finals.
In addition, the consonants , , and occur occasionally in recent in the speech of Cambodians familiar with French and other languages.
| + Monophthongs of Khmer ! rowspan=2 | ! colspan=2 Front vowel ! colspan=2 | Central vowel ! colspan=2 | Back vowel |
| + Diphthongs of Khmer ! colspan="2" | ! Front vowel ! Central vowel ! Back vowel |
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 .
| + Independent vowels of Khmer | |
| ឥ | |
| ឦ | |
| ឧ | |
| ឩ | |
| ឪ | |
| ឫ | |
| ឬ | |
| ឭ | |
| ឮ | |
| ឯ | |
| ឰ | |
| ឱ, ឲ | |
| ឳ |
The independent vowels are the vowels that can exist without a preceding or trailing consonant. The independent vowels may be used as monosyllabic words, or as the initial syllables in longer words. Khmer words never begin with regular vowels; they can, however, begin with independent vowels. Example: ឰដ៏, ឧទាហរណ៍, ឧត្តម, ឱកាស...។
Slight vowel epenthesis occurs in the clusters consisting of a plosive followed by , in those beginning , and in the cluster .
After the initial consonant or consonant cluster comes the syllabic nucleus, which is one of the vowels listed above. This vowel may end the syllable or may be followed by a syllable coda, which is a single consonant. If the syllable is stressed and the vowel is short, there must be a final consonant. All consonant sounds except and the aspirates can appear as the coda (although final is heard in some dialects, most notably in Northern Khmer).
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 vowel reduction to , although in careful or formal speech, including on television and radio, they are clearly articulated. An example of such a word is មនុស្ស mɔnuh, mɔnɨh, mĕəʾnuh ('person'), pronounced , or more casually . (1970). 9780877275213, Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications. ISBN 9780877275213
Most Khmer words consist of either one or two syllables. In most native disyllabic words, the first syllable is a minor syllable (fully unstressed) syllable. Such words have been described as sesquisyllabic (i.e. as having one-and-a-half syllables). There are also some disyllabic words in which the first syllable does not behave as a minor syllable, but takes secondary stress. Most such words are compounds, but some are single (generally loanwords). An example is ភាសា ('language'), pronounced . Words with three or more syllables, if they are not compounds, are mostly loanwords, usually derived from Pali, Sanskrit, or more recently, French. They are nonetheless adapted to Khmer stress patterns.Headley, Robert K.; Chhor, Kylin; Lim, Lam Kheng; Kheang, Lim Hak; Chun, Chen. 1977. Cambodian-English Dictionary. Bureau of Special Research in Modern Languages. The Catholic University of America Press. Washington, D.C.
Compounds, however, preserve the stress patterns of the constituent words. Thus សំបុកចាប, 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').
Although most Cambodian dialects are not tonal language, the colloquial Phnom Penh dialect has developed a tonal contrast (level versus peaking tone) as a by-product of the elision of .
The intonation pattern of a typical Khmer declarative phrase is a steady rise throughout followed by an abrupt drop on the last syllable.
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.
Exclamatory phrases follow the typical steadily rising pattern, but rise sharply on the last syllable instead of falling.
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, and some derivational morphology seems "purely decorative" and performs no known syntactic work.
Lexical category have been hard to define in Khmer. Henri Maspero, an early scholar of Khmer, claimed the language had no parts of speech, while a later scholar, Judith Jacob, posited four parts of speech and innumerable particles. (1968). 9780197135563, Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780197135563 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. Some of the more important lexical categories and their function are demonstrated in the following example sentence taken from a hospital brochure:
| "to tear apart" "to originate (trans.)" |
| "extinguished" "a screen, shade" |
| "to bite each other" "to compare" |
| "to cause to break" "to take for a walk" "to teach" |
| "to clean" "to kill" |
| "a trip" "information" "belief" |
Compounding in Khmer is a common derivational process that takes two forms, coordinate compounds and repetitive compounds. Coordinate compounds join two unbound morphemes (independent words) of similar meaning to form a compound signifying a concept more general than either word alone. Coordinate compounds join either two nouns or two verbs. Repetitive compounds, one of the most productive derivational features of Khmer, use reduplication of an entire word to derive words whose meaning depends on the class of the reduplicated word. A repetitive compound of a noun indicates plurality or generality while that of an adjectival verb could mean either an intensification or plurality.
Classifying particles are used after numerals, but are not always obligatory as they are in Thai grammar or Chinese, for example, and are often dropped in colloquial speech. Khmer nouns are divided into two groups: mass nouns, which take classifiers; and specific nouns, which do not. The overwhelming majority are mass nouns.
Possession is colloquially expressed by word order. The possessor is placed after the thing that is possessed. Alternatively, in more complex sentences or when emphasis is required, a possessive construction using the word របស់ (, "property, object") may be employed. In formal and literary contexts, the possessive particle នៃ () is used:
Pronoun 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). Khmer exhibits pronoun avoidance, so kinship terms, nicknames and proper names are often used instead of pronouns (including for the first person) among intimates. Subject pronouns are frequently dropped in colloquial conversation.
Adjectives, verbs and verb phrases may be made into nouns by the use of nominalization particles. Three of the more common particles used to create nouns are , , and . These particles are prefixed most often to verbs to form abstract nouns. The latter, derived from Sanskrit, also occurs as a suffix in fixed forms borrowed from Sanskrit and Pali such as ("health") from ("to be healthy").
Degrees of comparison are constructed syntactically. are expressed using the word ជាង : "A X B" (A is more X than). The most common way to express is with ជាងគេ : "A X " (A is the most X).Huffman, F. E., Promchan, C., & Lambert, C.-R. T. (1970). Modern spoken Cambodian. New Haven: Yale University Press. Intensity is also expressed syntactically, similar to other languages of the region, by reduplication or with the use of .
Khmer verbs are a relatively open class and can be divided into two types, main verbs and auxiliary verbs. Huffman defined a Khmer verb as "any word that can be (negated)", and further divided main verbs into three classes.
are verbs that may be followed by a direct object:
Intransitive verbs are verbs that can not be followed by an object:
Adjectival verbs are a word class that has no equivalent in English. When modifying a noun or verb, they function as adjectives or adverbs, respectively, but they may also be used as main verbs equivalent to English "be + adjective".
- Adjective
- Adverb
- Verb
A complete Khmer sentence consists of four basic elements—an optional topic, an optional subject, an obligatory predicate, and various adverbials and particles. The topic and subject are , predicates are and another noun phrase acting as an object or verbal attribute often follows the predicate.
When both a direct object and indirect object are present without any grammatical markers, the preferred order is SV(DO)(IO). In such a case, if the direct object phrase contains multiple components, the indirect object immediately follows the noun of the direct object phrase and the direct object's modifiers follow the indirect object:
This ordering of objects can be changed and the meaning clarified with the inclusion of particles. The word , which normally means "to arrive" or "towards", can be used as a preposition meaning "to":
Alternatively, the indirect object could precede the direct object if the object-marking preposition were used:
However, in spoken discourse OSV is possible when emphasizing the object in a topic–comment-like structure.
If the noun phrase contains a possessive adjective, it follows the noun and precedes the numeral. If a descriptive attribute co-occurs with a possessive, the possessive construction () is expected.
Some examples of typical Khmer noun phrases are:
The Khmer particle marked attributes in Old Khmer noun phrases and is used in formal and literary language to signify that what precedes is the noun and what follows is the attribute. Modern usage may carry the connotation of mild intensity.
Khmer uses three verbs for what translates into English as the copula. The general copula is ; it is used to convey identity with nominal predicates. For locative predicates, the copula is . The verb is the "existential" copula meaning "there is" or "there exists".
Negation is achieved by putting មិន before the verb and the particle ទេ at the end of the sentence or clause. In colloquial speech, verbs can also be negated without the need for a final particle, by placing ឥត before them.
Past tense can be conveyed by adverbs, such as "yesterday" or by the use of perfective particles such as
Different senses of future action can also be expressed by the use of adverbs like "tomorrow" or by the future tense marker , which is placed immediately before the verb, or both:
Imperative mood are often unmarked. For example, in addition to the meanings given above, the "sentence" can also mean "Go!". Various words and particles may be added to the verb to soften the command to varying degrees, including to the point of politeness (Jussive mood):
Prohibitives take the form " + verb" and also are often softened by the addition of the particle to the end of the phrase.
In more formal contexts and in polite speech, questions are also marked at their beginning by the particle .
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".
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").
The principal number words are listed in the following table, which gives Western and Khmer digits, Khmer spelling and IPA transcription.
| 0 | ០ | សូន្យ | |||||||
| 1 | ១ | មួយ | |||||||
| 2 | ២ | ពីរ | 20 | ២០ | ម្ភៃ | , | |||
| 3 | ៣ | បី | 30 | ៣០ | សាមសិប | ||||
| 4 | ៤ | បួន | 40 | ៤០ | សែសិប | ||||
| 5 | ៥ | ប្រាំ | 50 | ៥០ | ហាសិប | ||||
| 6 | ៦ | ប្រាំមួយ | 60 | ៦០ | ហុកសិប | ||||
| 7 | ៧ | ប្រាំពីរ | , | 70 | ៧០ | ចិតសិប | |||
| 8 | ៨ | ប្រាំបី | 80 | ៨០ | ប៉ែតសិប | ||||
| 9 | ៩ | ប្រាំបួន | 90 | ៩០ | កៅសិប | ||||
| 10 | ១០ | ដប់ | 100 | ១០០ | មួយរយ |
Intermediate numbers are formed by compounding the above elements. Powers of ten are denoted by loan words: រយ (100), ពាន់ (1,000), ម៉ឺន (10,000), សែន (100,000) and លាន (1,000,000) from Thai and កោដិ (10,000,000) from Sanskrit.
are formed by placing the particle ទី before the corresponding cardinal number.
| Intimate or addressing an inferior | អញ | ឯង | វា | ||||||
| neutral | ខ្ញុំ | អ្នក | គេ | ||||||
| Formal | យើងខ្ញុំ, ខ្ញុំបាទ | , | លោក (or kinship term, title or rank) | គាត់ | |||||
| Layperson to/about Buddhist clergy | ខ្ញុំព្រះករុណា | ព្រះតេជព្រះគុណ | ព្រះអង្គ | ||||||
| Buddhist clergy to layperson | អាត្មា, អាចក្តី | , | , | ញោមស្រី (to female) ញោមប្រុស (to male) | (to female), (to male) | (to female), (to male) | ឧបាសក (to male), ឧបាសិកា (to female) | (to male), | |
| when addressing royalty | ខ្ញុំព្រះបាទអម្ចាស់ or ទូលបង្គុំ (male), ខ្ញុំម្ចាស់ (female) | or (male), (female) | or (male), (female) | ព្រះករុណា | ទ្រង់ |
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 Vowel breaking. 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:
| ត + ា | = តា | 'grandfather' | |
| ទ + ា | = ទា | 'duck' |
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