Chamic languages
| Chamic | |
|---|---|
| Aceh–Chamic | |
| Geographic distribution |
Indonesia (Aceh), Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, China (Hainan Island), various countries with recent immigrants |
| Linguistic classification |
Austronesian
|
| Subdivisions |
|
| ISO 639-2 / 5 | |
| Glottolog | cham1327 |
The Chamic languages, also known as Aceh–Chamic and Achinese–Chamic, are a group of ten languages spoken in Aceh (Sumatra, Indonesia) and in parts of Cambodia, Vietnam and Hainan, China. The Chamic languages are a subgroup of Malayo-Sumbawan languages in the Austronesian family. The ancestor of this subfamily, proto-Chamic, is associated with the Sa Huỳnh culture, its speakers arriving in what is now Vietnam from Borneo or perhaps the Malay Peninsula.
After Acehnese, with 3.5 million, Jarai and Cham are the most widely spoken Chamic languages, with about 230,000 and 280,000 speakers respectively, in both Cambodia and Vietnam. Tsat is the most northern and least spoken, with only 3000 speakers.
Due to extensive borrowing resulting from long-term contact, Chamic and the Bahnaric languages - a branch of the Austroasiatic family - have many vocabulary items in common.
Graham Thurgood (1999:36) gives the following classification for the Chamic languages. Individual languages are marked by italics.
The Proto-Chamic numerals from 7 to 9 are shared with those of the Malayan languages, providing partial evidence for a Malayo-Chamic subgrouping (Thurgood 1999:37).
Roger Blench (2009) also proposes that there may have been at least one other Austroasiatic branch in coastal Vietnam that is now extinct, based on various Austroasiatic loanwords in modern-day Chamic languages that cannot be clearly traced to existing Austroasiatic branches (Blench 2009; Sidwell 2006).
...
Wikipedia