Khmer

Khmer is the principal Austroasiatic language of mainland Southeast Asia, native to the Cambodian plain and also spoken by the Khmer Krom and the Northern Khmer. Unlike Thai, Lao and Vietnamese, it is a non-tonal language, its royal and religious vocabulary steeped in Sanskrit and Pali.

It was first written before the seventh century in an abugida derived from the Pallava letters of southern India; the Thai and Lao scripts later grew out of the Khmer system. Old Khmer and Angkorian speech carried the inscriptions of Chenla and Angkor, and the Khmer Ramayana, the Reamker, was known from a seventh-century inscription, though its surviving poem is sixteenth-century work.

After Angkor's fall in the early 1400s, Middle Khmer absorbed Thai literary loans; Ayutthayan conquests under Naresuan isolated the northern dialects, while in the 1600s a Khmer army retook Stung Treng.