Mon-Khmer Languages

Mon-Khmer is a language family of mainland Southeast Asia that includes the national languages Cambodian (Khmer) and Vietnamese and more than a hundred minority languages spoken in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar (Burma), India, and China.

In the past some Mon-Khmer languages were more important than they are today. For example, in the first century CE the Khmer and the Mon had substantial kingdoms that covered much of what is today Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos as well as Cambodia. Today Mon is only spoken by minorities in Thailand and Myanmar, and is no longer an important written language. Khmer remains the written standard in Cambodia, surviving as the national language.

Many lesser-known Mon-Khmer languages have never been written down, while for some of these languages writing systems have been developed, but are not in widespread use. An exception is Khasi, spoken in Assam (Maghalay State, India) by several hundred thousand people, where a written standard enjoys everyday use.

Being generally dominated by other cultures, Mon-Khmer speakers are commonly multilingual in their own and neighboring or national languages. As such they tend to borrow a lot of words and even grammar. The most extreme example of this is possibly Vietnamese, which was under strong Chinese influence for over a thousand years. The Chinese component in Vietnamese is so great that it is not unusual for more than half of the words in a Vietnamese text to be of Chinese origin. The resemblance to Chinese is further heightened by the historical shift toward monosyllabic word structure and the use of tones.

Typical Mon-Khmer languages are characterized by subject-verb-object word order, by simple word shape with fixed word-final stress, no tones, extensive use of prefixes and infixes but not suffixes, noun classifiers, and serial verb construction.

While the word structures can be very simple, the sound systems can be rather complicated. Normally there are both voiced and voiceless consonants, including partly voiceless nasals, liquids (r and l sounds), and glides (w and y). Consonants may also have a laryngeal setting, which may be realized as a glottalized or creaky voice. The vowel inventories are among the largest in the world—most having distinctively short and long vowels and diphthonged vowels. Some even have a "register" distinction between plain and breathy or creaky vowels. In this way some Mon-Khmer languages have developed more than thirty or even forty distinct vowels.

Despite these structural similarities, Mon-Khmer languages vary considerably in their lexicons, so that even simple equivalent sentences are made with very different sounding words, e.g.,

"Where are you going?"

Chrau	biː	maːj	saːʔ
Jruq	ʌːj	saw	maː	rεʔ
Khmer	loːk	tow	naː
Vietnamese	ʔaɲ	di	dɐ̌w	dɐ̌j
Khmu	jƐ̀ʔ	jɔ̀h	mə́h
Mlabri	mεh	ɟak	inεŋ

"I am very sick"

Chrau	ʔaːɲ	ɟiː	maˇʔ
Jruq	ʔaj	ɟiʔ	ʔmat ʔmaːt
Khmer	kɲom	cɨː	nah
Vietnamese	toˆi	bi	laˇm
Khmu	ʔoˋʔ	ʔaˋh	saŋcu´ʔ saŋkı´ːn
Mlabri	ʔoh	choʔ	reːw

The term Mon-Khmer is sometimes used interchangeably with Austroasiatic. More usually Mon-Khmer is used by specialists to refer to a subgrouping of Austroasiatic languages. The common view regards Austroasiatic as consisting of two branches, Munda languages (spoken in India) and Mon-Khmer languages, consisting of at least ten subbranches. However, the question of whether there really is a Mon-Khmer family, as opposed to Austroasiatic, and what languages belong in it, is far from clear, and views changed many times in the course of the twentieth century. In 1926 Prater Wilhelm Schmidt suggested the following:

1. Malaccan (Aslian)
2. Central (Khasi, Palaung-Wa, Nicobar)
3. Mon-Khmer (Mon, Khmer, Bahnar, Jakun) and Munda
4. Chamic

At the time the position of Vietnamese was disputed, with some scholars preferring to classify it with Chinese and Thai, due to the presence of tones. In 1942 Thomas Sebeok suggested the grouping of all of the above languages, except for Munda, in one Mon-Khmer family, establishing the view that has dominated thinking until the present day.

In several papers in the early 1950s, André-Georges Haudricourt showed that Vietnamese developed tones independently and is related to Cambodian rather than Chinese or Thai. At about the same time it also became apparent that the Chamic languages of Vietnam are rather closely related to Malay, and therefore are classified as Austronesian rather than Mon-Khmer. The confusion had arisen because Chamic languages had been in intimate contact with Mon-Khmer languages such as Bahnar and Katu for such a long time that they had borrowed many words and even changed the form of Malay words to resemble Mon-Khmer words.

In the 1960s David Thomas and Robert Headley applied statistical methods to new data, classifying the Pearic, Khmer, Bahnaric, Katuic, Khumic, Monic, Palaungic, Khasi, and Viet-Muong as Mon-Khmer.

Thomas and Headley did not include Nicobarese or Aslian languages in their Mon-Khmer classification. In 1974 Gérard Diffloth suggested the division of these nine groups, plus Nicobarese and Aslian, into three branches based on apparent lexical innovations:

• Khmuic
• Palaungic
• Khasi

• Khmeric
• Pearic
• Bahnaric
• Katuic
• Viet-Muong

• Nicobaric
• Aslian
• Monic

More recently Ilia Peiros, using statistical methods, found no basis for a distinction between Mon-Khmer and Austroasiatic, and proposed the following six branches (without considering Nicobarese):

• Bahnaric
• Katuic
• Aslian
• Monic

• Palaung-Wa
• Khmuic

Today many Mon-Khmer languages are endangered; that is, they have fewer than two thousand speakers and are no longer being spoken by the youngest generation, who learn only national languages in school. This is a direct consequence of economic development and globalization, as swidden farming (shifting cultivation of the forest) is being replaced by sedentary farming of cash crops. Fortunately there are various field linguists working to record and preserve these endangered languages before it is too late.

Binh Nhu Ngo. (1999) Elementary Vietnamese. Boston: Tuttle.

Diffloth, Gérard. (1974) "Austro-Asiatic Languages." Encyclopædia Britannica. 15th ed. Chicago: Encyclopedia Brittanica, 480–484.

Haudricourt, André-Georges. (1954) "De l'origine des tons en viêtnamien." Journal Asiatique 242: 69–82.

Huffman, Franklin, Charan Promchan, and Chhom-Rak Thong Lambert. (1970) Modern Spoken Cambodian. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Peiros, Ilia. (1998) Comparative Linguistics in Southeast Asia. Canberra, Australia: Australian National University.

Rischel, Jørgen. (1995) Minor Mlabri: A Hunter-Gatherer Language of Northern Indochina. Copenhagen, Denmark: Museum Tusculanum Press.

Schmidt, Prater Wilhelm. (1926) Die Sprachfamilien und Sprachenkreise der Erde. 2 vols. Heidelberg, Germany: Carl Winter.

Sebeok, Thomas. (1942) "An Examination of the Austro-Asiatic Language Family." Language 18,3: 206–217.

Smith, Kenneth. (1979) Sedang Grammar. Pacific Linguistics, no. B-50. Canberra, Australia: Australian National University.

Suwilai Premsrirat. (1989) Khmu: A Minority Language of Thailand. Pacific Linguistics, no. A-75. Canberra, Australia: Australian National University.

Thomas, David. (1971) Chrau Grammar. Oceanic Linguistics Special Publication, no. 7. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Thomas, David, and Robert Headley. (1970) "More on Mon-Khmer Sub-Groupings." Lingua 25: 398–418.

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