Cham language

Cham (Cham: ꨌꩌ) is a Malayo-Polynesian language of the Austronesian family, spoken by the Cham of Southeast Asia. It is spoken primarily in the territory of the former Kingdom of Champa, which spanned modern Eastern Cambodia and Southern Vietnam. The Western variety is spoken by 220,000 people in Cambodia and 25,000 people in Vietnam. As for the Eastern variety, there are about 73,000 speakers in Vietnam,[2] for a total of approximately 320,000 speakers.

Cham
ꨌꩌ
'Cham' in Cham script
Pronunciation	[cam]
Native to	Cambodia and Vietnam
Region	Mainland Southeast Asia
Ethnicity	Cham
Native speakers	320,000 (2002 – 2008 census)[1]
Language family	Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian Malayo-Sumbawan (?) Chamic Coastal Cham
Early forms	Proto-Chamic Old Cham
Dialects	Western Cham (245,000)[2] Eastern Cham (73,000)
Writing system	Cham, Arabic, Latin
Official status
Recognised minority language in	Vietnam  Cambodia
Language codes
ISO 639-3	Either: cja – Western Cham cjm – Eastern Cham
Glottolog	cham1328

Cham is the principal and most spoken language among the Chamic languages, which are spoken in parts of mainland Southeast Asia, North Sumatra and on the island of Hainan. Cham is notable for being the oldest-attested Austronesian language, with the Đông Yên Châu inscription being verifiably dated to the late 4th century AD.

Phonology

Western Cham language has 21 consonants and 9 vowels.[3]

Consonants

Cham consonants

		Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Plosive	voiceless unaspirated	p	t	c	k	ʔ
	voiceless aspirated	pʰ	tʰ	cʰ	kʰ
Implosive		ɓ	ɗ
Nasal		m	n	ɲ	ŋ
Liquid			l
Fricative			s		ɣ	h
Rhotic
Approximant				j	w

Monophthongs

Cham vowels

	Front	Central	Back
High	i	ʉ	u
Mid (Tense)	e	ə	o
Mid (Lax)	ɛ		ʌ ɔ
Low		a

Diphthongs

ia, iɯ (occurs only before -ʔ), ea, ua, oa, au (occurs only before -ʔ),

iə, ɛə, ɔə, uə.

Grammar

Word formation

There are several prefixes and infixes which can be used for word derivation.[4]

• prefix pa-: causative, sometimes giving more force to the word
  • thău (to know) → pathău (to inform)
  • blẽi (to buy) → pablẽi (to sell)
  • bier (low) → pabier (to lower)
  • yău (like, as) → payău (to compare)
  • jœû (finished) → pajœû (well finished)
• prefix mœ-: sometimes causative, often indicates a state, possession, mutuality, reciprocity
  • jruu (poison) → mœjruu (to poison)
  • gruu (teacher) → mœgruu (to study)
  • téan (belly) → mœtéan (pregnancy)
  • boḥ (egg, fruit) → mœboḥ (lay an egg, give fruit)
  • daké (horn) → mœdaké (having horns)
• prefix ta- or da-: frequentative
  • galuṇg (to roll) → tagaluṇg (to roll around)
  • dâp (to hide oneself) → dadâp (to be wont to hide oneself)
• infix -an-: noun formation
  • pvâch (to speak) → panvâch (speech)
  • tiêu (row) → taniêu (oar)
  • dok (to live) → danok (house, living place)
• infix -mœ-: no specific meaning
  • payău (to compare) → pamœyău (to compare)

Reduplication is often used:[4]

• palẽi, pala-palẽi (country)
• raḅaḥ, raḅaḥ-raḅœp (misery)

Syntax and word order

Cham generally uses SVO word order, without any case marking to distinguish subject from object:[5]

Dahlak atong nhu. I beat he I beat him.

Nhu atong dahlak. he beat I He beats me.

Dummy pronominal subjects are sometimes used, echoing the subject:

Inœû hudiêp dahlak	nhu	atong	adẽi puthang nhu.
my wife's mother	she	beat	her husband's younger sister
"My wife's mother beats her husband's younger sister."

Composite verbs will behave as one inseparable verb, having the object come after it:

Bloḥ	nhu	ḍiḥ dii apvẽi	anẽk lakẽi.
then	she	lie at fire (i.e.: give birth)	son
"Then she gave birth to a son."

Sometimes, however, the verb is placed in front of the subject:

Lêk	dahlak.
fall	I
"I fall."

Auxiliary verbs are placed after any objects:

Nhu	ba	hudiêp nhu	nau.
he	bring	his wife	go
"He brings his wife."

If a sentence contains more than one main verb, one of the two will have an adverbial meaning:

Nhu	dâp	klaḥ	mœtai.
he	hide	evade	death
"He evaded death by hiding."

Adjectives come after the nouns they modify:[6]

thang	prong
house	big
"a big house"

If the order is reversed, the whole will behave like a compound:

ôrang	prong	shap
person	big	noise
"a noisy person"

Composite sentences can be formed with the particle krung:[7]

thaa drẽi athău thaa drẽi mœyău krung aï nhu brẽi kaa nhu the dog and the cat which his brother gave him "the dog and the cat his brother gave him"

nau tapak danau krung aï that ikan to go straight lake which brother is fishing "to go straight to the lake where his brother was fishing"

It is also possible to leave out this particle, without change in meaning:[5]

Dahlak brẽi athêh nan	kaa va dahlak	∅	dok dii palẽi Ram.
I give this horse	to my uncle	who	live in the village of Ram
"I have given this horse to my uncle, who lives in the village of Ram."

Questions are formed with the sentence-final particle rẽi:[8]

Anẽk	thău	vakhar	rẽi?
child	know	writing	q
"Can you write, child?"

Other question words are in situ:

Hẽû	nau	hatau?
you	go	where
"Where are you going?"

Nominals

Like many languages in Eastern Asia, Cham uses numeral classifiers to express amounts.[9] The classifier will always come after the numeral, with the noun coming invariably before or after the classifier-numeral pair.

limœû boḥ chœk five clf mountain "five mountains"

palẽi naṃ boḥ village six clf "six villages"

The above examples show the classifier boḥ, which literally means "egg" and is the most frequently used — particularly for round and voluminous objects. Other classifiers are ôrang (person) for people and deities, ḅêk for long objects, blaḥ (leaf) for flat objects, and many others.

The days of the month are counted with a similar system, with two classifiers: one (bangun) used to count days before the full moon, and the other one (ranaṃ) for days after the full moon.[10]

harẽi thaa bangun day one clf "first day after new moon"

harẽi dvaa klaṃ day two clf "second day after full moon"

Personal pronouns behave like ordinary nouns and do not show any case distinctions. There are different forms depending on the level of politeness. The first person singular, for example, is kău in formal or distant context, while it is dahlak (in Vietnam) or hulun (in Cambodia) in an ordinarily polite context. As is the case with many other languages of the region, kinship terms are often used as personal pronouns.[7]

Comparative and superlative are expressed with the locative preposition di/dii:[11]

tapaa	di	aï nhu
big	at	his brother
"bigger than his brother"

Verbs

There are some particles that can be used to indicate tense/aspect.[12] The future is indicated with shi or thi in Vietnam, with hi or si in Cambodia. The perfect is expressed with jϞ. The first one comes in front of the verb:

Arak ni	kău	shi	nao.
now	I	fut	go
"I will go now."

The second one is sentence-final:

Shit traa	kău	nao	jœû.
little more	I	go	prf
"I'll be gone in a moment."

Certain verbs can function as auxiliaries to express other tenses or aspects.[13] The verb dok ("to stay") is used for the continuous, vœk ("to return") for the repetitive aspect, and kiœng ("to want") for the future tense.

The negation is formed with ôh/ô at either or both sides of the verb, or with di/dii[14] in front.[12]

The imperative is formed with the sentence-final particle bêk, and the negative imperative with the preverbal jvai/jvẽi (in Vietnam and Cambodia respectively).[12]

Sociolinguistics

Diglossia

Brunelle observed two phenomena of language use among speakers of Eastern Cham: They are both diglossic and bilingual (in Cham and Vietnamese). Diglossia is the situation where two varieties of a language are used in a single language community, and oftentimes one is used on formal occasions (labelled H) and the other is more colloquial (labelled L).[15][16]

Dialectal differences

Cham is divided into two primary dialects. Western Cham is spoken by the Cham in Cambodia as well as in the adjacent Vietnamese provinces of An Giang and Tây Ninh. Eastern Cham is spoken by the coastal Cham populations in the Vietnamese provinces of Bình Thuận, Ninh Thuận, and Đồng Nai. The two regions where Cham is spoken are separated both geographically and culturally. The more numerous Western Cham are predominantly Muslims (although some in Cambodia now practice Theravāda Buddhism), while the Eastern Cham practice both Islam and Hinduism. Ethnologue states that the Eastern and Western dialects are no longer mutually intelligible. The table below gives some examples of words where the two dialects differed as of the 19th century.[17]

	Cambodia	southern Vietnam
vowels
child	anœk	anẽk
take	tuk	tôk
not	jvẽi	jvai
sibilants
one	sa	tha
save from drowning	srong	throng
salt	sara	shara
equal	samu	hamu
final consonants
heavy	trap	trak
in front	anap	anak
lexical differences
market	pasa	darak
hate	amoḥ	limuk

Lê et al. (2014:175)[18] lists a few Cham subgroups.

• Chăm Poông: in Thạnh Hiếu village, Phan Hiệp commune, Bắc Bình District, Bình Thuận Province. The Chăm Poông practice burial instead of cremation as the surrounding Cham do.
• Chăm Hroi (population 4,000): in Phước Vân District (Bình Định Province), Đồng Xuân District (Phú Yên Province), and Tây Sơn District (Bình Định Province)
• Chàvà Ku, a mixed Malay-Khmer people in Châu Đốc

Writing systems

Cham script is a Brahmic script.[2] The script has two varieties: Akhar Thrah (Eastern Cham) and Akhar Srak (Western Cham). The Western Cham language is written with the Arabic script or the aforementioned Akhar Srak.[19][20]

Dictionaries

The Ming dynasty Chinese Bureau of Translators produced a Chinese-Cham dictionary.

John Crawfurd's 1822 work "Malay of Champa" contains a dictionary of the Cham language.

See also

• Cham script
• Cham people
• Cham calendar
• Champa kingdom

Notes

1. Western Cham at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
   Eastern Cham at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
2. Cham. In The Unicode Standard, Version 11.0 (p. 661). Mountain View, CA: Unicode Consortium.
3. Ueki, Kaori (2011). Prosody and Intonation of Western Cham (PDF) (Ph.D. thesis). University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
4. Aymonier 1889, chapt. X
5. Aymonier 1889, chapt. XXI
6. Aymonier 1889, chapt. XIII
7. Aymonier 1889, chapt. XII
8. Aymonier 1889, chapt. XIX
9. Aymonier 1889, chapt. XI
10. Aymonier 1889, chapt. VIII
11. Aymonier 1889, chapt. XVI
12. Aymonier 1889, chapt. XV
13. Aymonier 1889, chapt. XIV
14. This happens to be homophonous with the locative preposition.
15. Brunelle, Marc (2008). "Diglossia, Bilingualism, and the Revitalization of Written Eastern Cham". Language Documentation & Conservation. 2 (1): 28–46. hdl:10125/1848.
16. Brunelle, Marc. (2009). Diglossia and Monosyllabization in Eastern Cham: A sociolinguistic study. In J. N. Stanford & D. R. Preston (Eds.), Variation in Indigenous Minority Languages (pp. 47-75). John Benjamins.
17. Aymonier 1889, chapt. IX
18. Lê Bá Thảo, Hoàng Ma, et. al; Viện hàn lâm khoa học xã hội Việt Nam - Viện dân tộc học. 2014. Các dân tộc ít người ở Việt Nam: các tỉnh phía nam. Ha Noi: Nhà xuất bản khoa học xã hội. ISBN 978-604-90-2436-8
19. Hosken, Martin (2019), L2/19-217 Proposal to encode Western Cham in the UCS (PDF)
20. Bruckmayr, Philipp (2019). "The Changing Fates of the Cambodian Islamic Manuscript Tradition". Journal of Islamic Manuscripts. 10 (1): 1–23. doi:10.1163/1878464X-01001001.

Further reading

• Grant, Anthony (Ed.); Sidwell, Paul (Ed.) (2005). Grant, Anthony; Sidwell, Paul (eds.). Chamic and beyond: studies in mainland Austronesian languages. Pl-569. Pacific Linguistics 569. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. doi:10.15144/PL-569. hdl:1885/146271. ISBN 0-85883-561-4.CS1 maint: extra text: authors list (link) CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
• Thurgood, Graham (1999). From ancient Cham to modern dialects: two thousand years of language contact and change : with an appendix of Chamic reconstructions and loanwords. Oceanic Linguistics Special Publication No. 28. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0-8248-2131-9.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
• Aymonier, Étienne; Cabaton, Antoine (1906). Dictionnaire čam-français. Volume 7 of Publications de l'École française d'Extrême-Orient. Paris: E. Leroux.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
• Aymonier, Etienne (1889). Grammaire de la langue chame. Saigon: Imprimerie coloniale.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
• Blood, D. L., & Blood, D. (1977). East Cham language. Vietnam data microfiche series, no. VD 51-72. Huntington Beach, Calif: Summer Institute of Linguistics.
• Blood, D. L. (1977). A romanization of the Cham language in relation to the Cham script. Vietnam data microfiche series, no. VD51-17. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics.
• Edwards, E. D.; Blagden, C. O. (1939). "A Chinese Vocabulary of Cham Words and Phrases". Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, University of London. 10 (1): 53–91. JSTOR 607926.
• Braginsky, Vladimir (2014). Classical Civilizations of South-East Asia. Routledge. pp. 398–. ISBN 978-1-136-84879-7.
• Moussay, Gerard (1971). Dictionnaire Cam-Vietnamien-Français. Phan Rang: Centre Culturel Cam.
• Sakaya. 2014. Từ điển Chăm. Nhà xuất bản Tri Thức. ISBN 978-604-908-999-2
• Various. 2011. Ngôn ngữ Chăm: thực trạng và giải pháp. Hanoi: Nhà xuất bản Phụ Nữ.

External links

• Kaipuleohone has an archive including written materials of Cham