Khmer Thai Language

[taytee]

So I can pretty much speak thai well and understand but unfortunately have a girlfriend the past few years who speaks Khmer thai (not Khmer)  i can understand some words, but its really hard to find people who speak this mostly seems to be people around buriram and Surin areas... Im wondering if there are any expats on the forums who can understand spoken Thai Khmer? I could use help with something.. thanks in advance.

[Oxx]

I think you are probably referring to the language spoken by people of Khmer descent living in Isaan.  It's completely unrelated to Thai, and is a dialect of Khmer.  It is more commonly known as Northern Khmer or Surin Khmer.  Wikipedia has an article about it.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Khmer_dialect

[DannyCarlton]

It's called Khmen. It's only spoken in the provinces you have mentioned and a couple of provinces in Cambodia close to the Thai border. I speak a little Khmer and have tried to converse with people from Surin in their dialect, no success. Khmen is radically different from Khmer. It's also dying out. Less and less young people from Surin speak Khmen now.

[uhuh]

"Kmen" is just the way Thai speakers pronounce the word "Khmer".

 

Surin Khmer and Cambodian Khmer are hardly mutually intelligible.

Surin Khmer is well known for it's system of vowel phonemes, see Wikipedia.

[taytee]

I have seen around youtube and heard about some farang can speak it but as you mentioned it is probably dying out as mostly older people speak it... Although being in pattaya ive seen quite a few working girls who speak it as well.. Just annoying though to learn thai just to have some other language i dont understand spoken around me.

[Nokawou]

it is Kui (กุย) or Suai (ส่วย) 400 000 speakers according to Josua project, my wife speaks it natively and it is completely unintelligible to Thai speakers and me as well. I am currently creating a concise word list from a dictionary and started a topic on yesterday.  

[Peter Denis]

3 minutes ago, Nokawou said:

it is Kui (กุย) or Suai (ส่วย) 400 000 speakers according to Josua project, my wife speaks it natively and it is completely unintelligible to Thai speakers and me as well. I am currently creating a concise word list from a dictionary and started a topic on yesterday.  

Hi Nokawou,

Can you please share the link to the thai khmer word-list you are compiling.

Thanks!

 

I live with my thai girlfriend in her village approx 10 km from KhunHan (SiSaKet province).

Ancient Khmer is the language spoken here by almost everybody (including small children).

Interesting is that it is only spoken language transferred by word-of-mouth, and nobody knows how to read or write it.  Except for some very old people, everybody also speaks and writes thai as all official communications and documents are in thai. 

This dual language thing doesn't make it easy for me to communicate locally. 

There are also some people of North Isaan living in the village, that speak Isaan (a sort of Lao dialect).

My girlfriend is kind of a language-chameleon and whatever language she is spoken to, she responds in be it ancient Khmer, Thai, Lao, Chinese or english.

Another interesting fact is that, when visiting Cambodia I thought that her speaking ancien Khmer would be a big advantage.  And indeed she understands what people are saying, but does not dare to speak her ancient Khmer and therefore I need to refer to pidgin english for communicating.

TIP for your word-list > Instead of Sawadee (thai), the 'hello how are you' equivalent in ancient Khmer is the question 'Sibai hoi?', which - as they tell me - literally means 'Have you eaten already?'.  The standard answer to it is 'Si hoi' (I have eaten already).  Never fails to create a hilarious response when I respond with 'Si hoi'.

 

[Nokawou]

The wife is from Sikhoraphum district but I do not live in Thailand so no immersion for me. The word list is not online I had to go to the Leiden University library in person and had to copy the dictionary myself (over 400 pages). There are quite large differences in pronunciations between districts and even villages but as this dictionary is the only reference I have found it is a starting point. I added the files to this message we need to share this I think there are a lot of guy's that can use it. Have a look at it I only scanned it last week so have not started with the project just cleaned up the scans and read the introduction part. I do not read IPA but read Thai so want to create a Kui - Thai - English word list. I try to keep away from transliterations at all cost as they mess up your pronunciation completely. 

boek1 (clean).pdf boek2 (clean).pdf boek3 (clean).pdf boek4 (clean).pdf boek5 (clean).pdf boek6 (clean).pdf boek7 (clean).pdf boek8 (clean).pdf

[Nokawou]

My wife did try to speak to the locals in Cambodia but they did not understand at all although in Laos she could communicate freely in her Lao dialect. Interestingly Kui is not a tonal language like Thai so you should be able to learn it much faster than Thai. Kui is a "low" language that is why your girlfriend did not try to speak it in Cambodia. When I compiled my wife's CV she refused to put in that she speaks Kui. You probably know about the stratification (status) in the Thai community this is something that irritated me, as a Dutch person this is unacceptable, but you have to live with it and now I accept it as part of "Thainess" but still do not approve of it.  

[uhuh]

Surin Khmer/ Northern Khmer and Suai are not the same language. They are not mutually intelligible. 

 

Northern Khmer has a lot more than 400000 speakers and is hardly dying out. 

Just travel to Surin, Buriram or Si Saket.

 

Khmer has a very low status in Thailand.

I once showed a textbook of Cambodian Khmer which i had bought for a friend in Taiwan to a girl from Ban Kruat. She was very surprised that a textbook of her language existed and that any foreigner wanted to study it. 

Thai speakers can immediately hear a Khmer accent and treat people accordingly ????

Since many well-off Cambodians come to Surin for shopping and medical care the status of Khmer is rising. The entrance of Surin Hospital now has signs in Thai,  English and Khmer (but the people of Surin cannot read the Khmer,  because they are illiterate in their mother tongue)

 

One funny thing: in Bangkok, Khmer speakers are almost the only ones who roll the r the way Thais say you should do it (but Bangkok Thais and the Lao migrants from Issarn don't do it).

Khmer say Surrin, not Sulin.

 

 

[Peter Denis]

I don't speak thai or khmer (nor any other asian language), but even for me not understanding a word of what they are saying it's very easy to distinguish whether people are speaking thai or khmer.

Pronounciation is very different, and also the vocabulary is totally different.  There is hardly a word in khmer same as in thai, and words don't have same root.  Something like French and Finnish in Europe, which also have totally different roots and hardly any similarities.

 

 

[neeray]

Thank Gawd that there is always the "universal language". The most important part of the

Thai girl/farang relationship solved.

[uhuh]

1 hour ago, Peter Denis said:

I don't speak thai or khmer (nor any other asian language), but even for me not understanding a word of what they are saying it's very easy to distinguish whether people are speaking thai or khmer.

Pronounciation is very different, and also the vocabulary is totally different.  There is hardly a word in khmer same as in thai, and words don't have same root.  Something like French and Finnish in Europe, which also have totally different roots and hardly any similarities.

 

 

You are right as regards the original Khmer or Thai words. 

Khmer si bai = Thai gin kao - the words are very different.  But you can see there are structural similarities: words consist of only one syllable,  word order is (subject -) verb - object,  pronouns can be dropped.

 

The vocabulary of both languages has a lot of loanwords from more advanced civilizations: words about government and bureaucracy are from pali/sanskrit, numbers higher than 20 are from Chinese. These words are often very similar in Khmer and Thai.

 

Surin Khmer as spoken by young people contains a lot of Thai words for modern things like "rottour" (interprovince bus),  "seven" (7/11).