Learn Khmer for Travel, Work and Study

The Khmer script descends from the same Indian ancestor as Thai and Lao and looks like it: rounded, written left to right, with no spaces between words and no capitals. It is long because each of the thirty-three consonants has a full form and a subscript form that sits underneath a preceding consonant, and because its many vowels are written as signs placed above, below, before or after the consonant they belong to. The consonants come in two series, and the series decides how a vowel sign is read, so the same mark is “a” after one letter and “o” after another. Reading Khmer takes months; most learners start speaking first and let the script follow.

The sounds are the real work. Khmer has around thirty vowels and diphthongs where English has about fifteen, several of them made with the mouth in positions English never uses, and a set of aspirated consonants — “kh”, “chh”, “th”, “ph” — that must be kept apart from their plain partners. Words are mostly one or two syllables, and the first syllable of a two-syllable word is often a brief unstressed puff before the main one. There are no tones at all, which Thai and Vietnamese learners find almost disorienting; and there is a great deal of borrowed vocabulary from Sanskrit and Pali in the learned register, and from French in the kitchen and the garage — “kafe”, “ban”, “sabu”.

The grammar hardly exists in the European sense. Verbs do not change: “tov” is go, went, will go and going, and small particles mark time when it matters. Nouns have no plural, no gender and no case; a classifier word slips in when things are counted. The order is subject, verb, object, with adjectives after their nouns, and a question is made by adding “te” at the end. What takes the grammar's place is the system of pronouns and registers: Khmer has many words for “I” and “you” chosen by the age and status of the speaker and the listener, a separate vocabulary for addressing monks and another for royalty, and in daily life the kinship terms — “bong”, older sibling, “oun”, younger sibling, “ming”, aunt — do the work of pronouns.

Standard Khmer is the speech of Phnom Penh and the central plain, understood across the country; the north-west around Battambang and Siem Reap speaks it with small differences, and the Khmer of the Mekong delta in Vietnam and of the Surin region of Thailand are dialects of the same language. Khmer belongs to the Austroasiatic family with Vietnamese, but the two have grown so far apart that the kinship is a matter for linguists; Thai and Lao, which look like cousins because of the script and the loanwords, are from a different family altogether.

Khmer's grammar is so light that a learner strings sentences together within weeks, which puts the language ahead of Thai or Vietnamese at the start; the US Foreign Service Institute nonetheless counts it among the longer languages for English speakers, in the 1,100-hour group, because the vowels take a long time to hear and produce, the vocabulary shares nothing with English, and the script is slow. Learners describe a pleasant first stage of markets and motorbike taxis in Khmer, a plateau when understanding fast speech and the registers of politeness, and a separate, longer project to read. Cambodians are gentle correctors and generous listeners.

In Phnom Penh, Siem Reap and the beach towns, a visitor manages in English at every hotel, restaurant and temple gate, and the young Cambodians who work in tourism speak it well; French survives among the elderly and in some professions. Away from the circuit — in a provincial market, a village, a government office, a clinic — Khmer is the only language. The international organisations and the garment and technology firms with foreign management work in English; Cambodian companies, ministries, schools and courts work in Khmer. Universities teach in Khmer, with some programmes in English and French; a foreigner enrolling in a Khmer-taught course learns the language first at a university institute.

• Yes has a gender: A man says “baat” and a woman says “chaa”, and the whole country notices when a foreigner picks the wrong one. “No” is “te” for everyone.
• The longest alphabet: With its consonants, their subscript forms and its dozens of vowel signs, the Khmer script holds the record for the longest alphabet in use — seventy-four letters by the usual count.
• Counting in fives: Khmer has words for one to five and then builds: six is “pram-muoy”, five-one, seven “pram-pi”, five-two, up to ten, which has a word of its own. Hands are the calculator.
• Everyone is a sibling: “Bong” — older sibling — is how you address a waiter, a driver or a shopkeeper a little older than you, and “oun”, younger sibling, anyone younger. Pronouns are for grammar books; family words are for life.
• No tones in a land of tones: Thai to the west, Lao to the north and Vietnamese to the east all use pitch to tell words apart; Khmer does not, and is the one language of the region an untrained ear can learn to pronounce.
• The sampeah: The greeting with palms together is raised higher the more respected the person: chest height for friends, chin for elders, nose for parents and teachers, forehead for monks and the king.
• Two currencies, one wallet: Prices in Cambodia are quoted in US dollars and change comes in riel, so a Khmer number may be a dollar figure or a riel figure, and learners ask “dollar?” before they panic.

Khmer has no national or international certificate exam, and no Cambodian visa or residence permit asks for the language; Cambodia's long-stay visas are granted on paperwork, not on Khmer. Citizenship alone sets a bar: an applicant for naturalisation must speak Khmer, to know the Khmer script and to have some knowledge of Cambodian history, assessed by the authorities rather than through a graded exam, and it is sought by few foreigners. Universities admit foreign students to Khmer-taught courses on the strength of their own language institutes' assessments; programmes taught in English or French ask for those languages.

When a learner needs a document, the one that exists is a certificate from a university Khmer programme — the Institute of Foreign Languages at the Royal University of Phnom Penh teaches Khmer to foreigners by level and certifies each level, and several private schools in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap do the same — and employers in Cambodia accept these or simply judge Khmer in the interview. Progress is quick at the start: most learners in regular lessons handle markets, transport and small talk within three months, follow a slow conversation within a year, and read a newspaper headline after a year or more of separate work on the script.

Khmer is thinly served by learner's materials and well served by a few scholarly ones built for exactly this gap. The self-learner needs a dictionary that searches by sound as well as by script, since the script comes late; a course that teaches speaking first with recordings by native speakers, because the vowels cannot be learned from any romanisation; and Khmer radio or television daily, which is free online and gives the ear the rhythm long before the words mean anything.

In Khmer a tutor is the only reliable route to the vowels. No romanisation captures thirty vowel sounds with the Latin alphabet's five letters, and a learner cannot hear which of two neighbouring vowels they have produced until a Cambodian repeats the word back. A tutor is also the guide to register — which “I” and which “you” for a market, a ministry and a monk — and to the script, which is far quicker to learn with someone who knows the two consonant series by heart than from a chart.