Khmer · ខ្មែរ

About Khmer

Language family

Austroasiatic, Khmer branch

Where it's spoken

Cambodia

Speakers

roughly 16–18 million speakers

Khmer is notably non-tonal, setting it apart from most of its Southeast Asian neighbors, and belongs to the Austroasiatic family alongside Vietnamese and Mon, though the connections are distant enough that none are mutually intelligible. Its script, one of the longest alphabets in the world with 74 letters, descends from a South Indian Pallava-Brahmi writing tradition brought by Indian traders and monks over a thousand years ago. Khmer's classical inscriptions and the Angkor temple complex give the language an unusually deep, well-preserved written record for the region.