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Khmer 〔Oxford English Dictionary, "Khmer".〕 or Cambodian (natively (:pʰiːəsaː kʰmaːe), or more formally (:kʰeɛmaʔraʔ pʰiːəsaː)) is the language of the Khmer people and the official language of Cambodia. With approximately 16 million speakers, it is the second most widely spoken Austroasiatic language (after Vietnamese). Khmer has been influenced considerably by Sanskrit and Pali, especially in the royal and religious registers, through the vehicles of Hinduism and Buddhism. The more colloquial registers have influenced, and have been influenced by, Thai, Lao, Vietnamese, and Cham, all of which, due to geographical proximity and long-term cultural contact, form a sprachbund in peninsular Southeast Asia.〔(Enfield, N.J. (2005). Areal Linguistics and Mainland Southeast Asia )〕 It is also the earliest recorded and earliest written language of the Mon–Khmer family, predating Mon and by a significant margin Vietnamese, due to Old Khmer being the language of the historical empires of Chenla, Angkor and, presumably, their earlier predecessor state, Funan. The vast majority of Khmer speakers speak Central Khmer, the dialect of the central plain where the Khmer are most heavily concentrated. Within Cambodia, regional accents exist in remote areas but these are regarded varieties of Central Khmer. Two exceptions are the speech of the capital, Phnom Penh, and that of the remote Cardamom mountains, both of which differ sufficiently enough from Central Khmer to be considered separate dialects of Khmer. Outside of Cambodia, two distinct dialects are spoken by ethnic Khmers native to areas that were historically part of the Khmer Empire. The Northern Khmer dialect is spoken by the Khmer of the southern regions of Northeast Thailand and Khmer Krom, or Southern Khmer, is the first language of the Khmer of Vietnam. Khmer is primarily an analytic, isolating language. There are no inflections, conjugations or case endings. Instead, particles and auxiliary words are used to indicate grammatical relationships. General word order is subject–verb–object, and modifiers follow the word they modify. Classifiers appear after numbers when used to count nouns, though not always so consistently as in languages like Chinese. Khmer differs from neighboring languages such as Thai, Burmese, Lao and Vietnamese in that it is not a tonal language. Words are stressed on the final syllable, hence many words conform to the typical Mon–Khmer pattern of a stressed syllable preceded by a minor syllable. The Khmer script is an abugida descended from the Brahmi script via the southern Indian Pallava script; its features include subscripted versions of consonants used to write clusters, and a division of consonants into two series with different inherent vowels. ==Classification== (詳細はAustroasiatic language family, the most archaic family in an area that stretches from the Malay Peninsula through Southeast Asia to East India.〔Diffloth, Gerard & Zide, Norman. (''Austroasiatic Languages'' ).〕 Austroasiatic, which also includes Mon, Vietnamese and Munda, has been studied since 1856 and was first proposed as a language family in 1907. Despite the amount of research, there is still doubt about the internal relationship of the languages of Austroasiatic.〔Sidwell, Paul (2009a). (The Austroasiatic Central Riverine Hypothesis ). Keynote address, SEALS, XIX.〕 Diffloth places Khmer in an eastern branch of the Mon-Khmer languages.〔Diffloth, Gérard (2005). "The contribution of linguistic palaeontology and Austroasiatic". in Laurent Sagart, Roger Blench and Alicia Sanchez-Mazas, eds. ''The Peopling of East Asia: Putting Together Archaeology, Linguistics and Genetics.'' 77–80. London: Routledge Curzon.〕 In these classification schemes Khmer's closest genetic relatives are the Bahnaric and Pearic languages.〔Shorto, Harry L. edited by Sidwell, Paul, Cooper, Doug and Bauer, Christian (2006). ''A Mon–Khmer comparative dictionary''. Canberra: Australian National University. Pacific Linguistics. ISBN 0-85883-570-3〕 More recent classifications doubt the validity of the Mon-Khmer sub-grouping and place the Khmer language as its own branch of Austroasiatic equidistant from the other 12 branches of the family.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Khmer language」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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