Cambodian
or Khmer is the national language of Cambodia, spoken by over twelve
million people within the country. Mutually intelligible dialects of
Cambodian are also spoken by people living in the Mekong Delta region of
Vietnam, Thailand, in the northeastern provinces of Surin, Buriram and
Sisaket. Beyond South East Asia there are sizable communities in France
and USA, most of whom fled Cambodia during the 1970's.Cambodia belongs to the Mon-Khmer language family. Most of the languages of this family are spoken in Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand although a few are found further afield. with the exception of Cambodian, they are minority languages, often spoken in only a few villages.
Cambodian is unique in enjoying the status of a national language and is one of the very few Mon-Khmer languages to have a written form and an established literary tradition.
Unlike neighboring Vietnamese, Lao and Thai, Cambodian is not a tonal language. It does, however, share many common grammatical features with other major South East Asian languages. Word order in Cambodian follows a familiar subject + verb + object pattern.
Native Cambodian words tend to consist of either one or two syllables; but a large number of foreign words have been borrowed from Sanskrit, Pali, Thai and French. For the western learner, perhaps the most notable feature of the language is the lack of verb and noun inflections; indeed, with neither complicated verb tenses nor singular and plural forms of nouns to memorize, Cambodian grammar can be absorbed relatively painlessly.
Khmer Alphabet
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| Khmer Language Alphabet |
Khmer Subscript Alphabet
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| Khmer Language Subscript Alphabet |
Khmer Vowels
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| Khmer Language Vowels |
Khmer Numbers
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| Khmer Language Numbers |
Read more at http://www.ancientscripts.com/khmer.html
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
