A Comparative Study of Vocabulary of the Khmer Dialect in Thailand and Standard Khmer in Cambodia

Abstract

This article compares the vocabulary of the Khmer dialect spoken in Thailand and standard Khmer in Cambodia. 1,000 words from the basic Khmer vocabulary list and 1,000 words from official Khmer vocabulary list were used for this study. The data were collected by recording pronunciation of language informants who used the Khmer dialect in Thailand and standard Khmer in Cambodia. The finding revealed that in the basic Khmer vocabulary list there were 930 similar words, which accounted for 93 percent, and 70 different words, which accounted for seven percent. In the official Khmer vocabulary list, there were 190 similar words which accounted for 19 percent, 172 partial concordant words, which accounted for 17.2 percent and 638 different words, which accounted for 63.8 percent. This diffrence was due to the fact that there was no change in the basic vocabulary of the Khmer dialect spoken in Thailand, whereas there were a great number of non-concordant words in the official word list because there was no written language of the Khmer dialect in Thailand, which has existed in the context and under the influence of the Thai language. Therefore, the dialect speakers could not understand the newly-formed official Khmer language.