Khmer Language - Geographic Distribution and Dialects

Geographic Distribution and Dialects

Khmer is spoken by approximately 12.6 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 one million Khmer native to southern Vietnam and 1.4 million in northeast Thailand speak dialects of Khmer.

Khmer dialects, although mutually intelligible, 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. 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.

• 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 schools and used by the media is based on the Battambang dialect spoken throughout the plains of the northwest and central provinces.

Northern Khmer (called Khmer Surin in Khmer) refers to the dialects spoken in 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 midpoint of the Middle Khmer period. 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.

Western Khmer, also called Cardamom Khmer or Chanthaburi Khmer, spoken by a very small, isolated population in the Cardamom mountain range extending from western Cambodia into eastern Central 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.

Phnom Penh Khmer is spoken in the capital and surrounding areas. This dialect is characterized by merging or complete elision of syllables, considered by speakers from other regions to be 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.

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. Consequently very little research has been published regarding this dialect. It generally has been influenced by Vietnamese for three centuries and accordingly displays a pronounced accent, tendency toward monosyllablic words and lexical differences from the standard.