The People

The Khmer language belongs to the Austro-Asiatic (or Mon-Khmer) linguistic family, which includes Vietnamese, various “aboriginal” languages of the uplands of western Vietnam and eastern Cambodia, the Mon of Burma, and isolated outliers as far west as India.

One other language was also intrusive into mainland Southeast Asia: Cham, a member of the enormously widespread Malayo-Polynesian family (with speakers of one or another members of the family distributed all the way from Madagascar in the west to Easter Island in the east). The ancestral Cham may have originated in Borneo, and are known to have settled the central coast of today's Vietnam by the beginning of the Common Era. Eventually, they evolved a powerful, Indianized state that often conflicted with the rulers of the Khmer Empire, and at one time even took Angkor. By the fourteenth century, they had converted to Islam. Oppression by the powerful Dai Viet state caused large numbers to flee to Cambodia, where they today form a Muslim minority.

Ever since the downfall of Angkor as a capital, the state religion of Cambodia, Siam (as Thailand was called in pre-colonial days), and Burma has been Theravada Buddhism, whereas under the empire it had been Hinduism and Mahayana Buddhism.