Tampuan language
| Tampuan | |
|---|---|
| Tumpoon | |
| Native to | Cambodia |
| Ethnicity | Tampuan people |
|
Native speakers
|
31,000 (2008 census) to 57,000 (2013 survey) |
| Khmer script | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | tamp1251 |
Tampuan (IPA: [təmpṳan], Khmer: ទំពួន) is the language of Tampuan people indigenous to the mountainous regions of Ratanakiri Province in Cambodia. As of the 2008 census there were 31,000 speakers, which amounts to 21% of the province's population. It is closely related to Bahnar and Alak, the three of which form the Central Bahnaric language grouping within the Mon-Khmer language family according to traditional classification. Sidwell's more recent classification groups Tampuan on an equal level with Bahnar and the South Bahnaric languages in a larger Central Bahnar group. The Tampuan language has no native writing although in 1997, a bilingual education pilot project ran by the Cambodian government, UNESCO and various NGOs developed a script based on the Khmer alphabet to write Tampuan. The modified Khmer script was approved in 2003 for use in educating Tampuans in their native tongue.
The vast majority of Tampuan speakers live in a contiguous zone that runs approximately north-east from Lumphat past the provincial capital of Banlung to the Tonle San river near the Vietnamese border. This region lies north-west of the area inhabited by speakers of the unrelated Jarai language with whom the Tampuan maintain close ties. A much smaller population of about 400 Tampuan speakers lives 20 miles to the north of Banlung, down the Tonle San river, separated from their brethren by Brao speakers.
Three dialects of Tampuan have been identified. The Tampuan spoken in the larger region forms a dialect continuum with Western Tampuan at the south-west extreme and Eastern Tampuan found in the north-east. These two dialects show only a small difference in phonology. However, the Northern dialect spoken by a much smaller, more isolated community near the town of Ka Choun is more divergent both in phonology and lexicon, possibly due to greater influence from the neighboring Lao language. Native speakers report that all three dialects are mutually intelligible. The dialect used for this description is the most-studied Western Tampuan as spoken around the town of Banlung.
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