World Language Map

Where is Central Khmer spoken?

Central Khmer (ភាសាខ្មែរ) is an Austroasiatic language, spoken in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Central Khmer is spoken

Central Khmer is spoken in 4 countries: Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Cambodia89%15,186,693
LaosNot givenNot given
ThailandNot givenNot given
VietnamNot givenNot given

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Central Khmer is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Central Khmer.

How many people speak Central Khmer?

Wikidata gives about 16.6 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). It also lists about 1 million second-language speakers (ethnologue.com, 2015). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where Central Khmer sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Central Khmer as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Austroasiatic
  2. Khmeric
  3. Central Khmer

Related languages

Other languages in the Khmeric group:

More about Central Khmer

Codes: ISO 639-3 khm, Glottolog cent1989. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Central Khmer

Where is Central Khmer spoken?

Central Khmer is spoken in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. Unicode CLDR puts it at 89% of the population of Cambodia, which is about 15,186,693 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Central Khmer?

Wikidata gives about 16.6 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled. It also lists about 1 million second-language speakers (ethnologue.com, 2015).

Which language family is Central Khmer in?

Glottolog places Central Khmer in the Austroasiatic family, in the branch Khmeric.

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