History
The modern-day speakers of Nyah Kur are the descendants of the Mon who did not flee west when the Khmer overran their empire in the 9th and 11th centuries. Consequently, modern Mon and Nyah Kur have both developed directly from Old Mon independently for almost a millennium.
Nyah Kur was discovered by linguists early in the 20th century, but was not recognized as being related (in fact a "sister" language) to Mon for nearly 70 years.
Due to integration into Thai society, the number of speakers of Nyah Kur as a first language is rapidly decreasing and some predict the language to become extinct within the next century unless the current course is reversed. Language changes are also happening as younger generations pronounce certain phonemes different from older generations. For instance, final -/r/ and -/l/ are now often pronounced as - by younger generations (Premsrirat 2002). This change is also happening in the Saek language of Nakhon Phanom Province, Isan, Thailand. However, since the younger generations generally have positive attitudes about their language and support the idea of having an orthography for their language (Premsrirat 2002).
Read more about this topic: Nyah Kur Language
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