Historical information:Eastern Cham is an endangered Austronesian language spoken in Vietnam. It is one of about a dozen Chamic languages, which are mainly spoken in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Hainan Island, China. The Proto-Chamic ancestors moved to Mainland Southeast Asia several millennia ago and have been in intense contact with languages like Vietnamese and Khmer ever since. Eastern Cham itself descends from the lingua franca of the Champa kingdom, which ruled much of present-day Vietnam from the 2nd to the 17th centuries. Nowadays, Eastern Cham has around 70,000 speakers, but there are few monolinguals remaining, and a lack of intergenerational transmission has been reported. Nevertheless, the language has its own script, and has a long written tradition dating back to around the 4th century. The materials in this collection are part of Kenneth Baclawski Jr.'s graduate research on the Eastern Cham language starting in 2014. The material has two parts: half of the data comes from one older speaker living in San Francisco, USA; and the other half from mostly younger speakers living in Vietnam. The Vietnamese speakers are primarily university students living in Ho Chi Minh City, where there is a sizeable Cham community. Other speakers include several in Seattle, USA and the Cham villages of Ninh Thuận province, Vietnam. This data focuses on syntax and sociolinguistic variation. All audio was recorded with a Marantz PMD-661 audio recorder. Funding for this research comes from Oswalt Endangered Language Grants (Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, University of California, Berkeley) from 2014-2015 and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. DGE-1106400.
Scope and content:Audio recordings of lexical and grammatical elicitation sessions, sociolinguistic surveys, narratives, and songs
Repository: Survey of California and Other Indian Languages
Preferred citation: Mohammad Soleh Thiên, Kenneth Baclawski, and Sikhara (Đàng Thanh Quốc Thuận). Eastern Cham Field Materials, 2014-20, Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, University of California, Berkeley, http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.7297/X2FB510B.
No results0
We acknowledge with respect the Ohlone people on whose traditional, ancestral, and unceded land we work and whose historical relationships with that land continue to this day.