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History

The Cham script is a descendant of the Brahmi script of India.² Cham was one of the first scripts to develop from the Pallava script, this happened in the mid 350s CE. It came to Southeast Asia as part of the expansion of Hinduism and Buddhism. Hindu stone temples of the Champa civilization contain both Sanskrit and Chamic language stone inscriptions.³ The earliest inscriptions in Vietnam are found in Mỹ Sơn, a temple complex dating from c. 300 CE to c. 1200 CE.⁴⁵ The oldest inscription is written in faulty Sanskrit. After this, inscriptions alternate between Sanskrit and the Cham language of the times.⁶

Cham kings studied classical Indian texts, such as the Dharmaśāstra, and inscriptions make reference to Sanskrit literature. Eventually, while the Cham and Sanskrit languages influenced one another, Cham culture assimilated Hinduism, and Chams were eventually able to adequately express the Hindu religion in their own language.⁷ By the 8th century, the Cham script had outgrown Sanskrit and the Cham language was in full use.⁸ Most preserved manuscripts focus on religious rituals, epic battles and poems, and myths.⁹

Modern Chamic languages have the Southeast Asian areal features of monosyllabicity, tonality, and glottalized consonants. However, they had reached the Southeast Asia mainland disyllabic and non-tonal. The script needed to be altered to meet these changes.¹⁰

Variety

The Cham now live in two groups: the Western Cham of Cambodia and the Eastern Cham (Panduranga/Phan Rang Cham) of Vietnam. For the first millennium AD, the Chamic languages were a dialect chain along the Vietnam coast. The breakup of this chain into distinct languages occurred once the Vietnamese pushed south, causing most Cham to move back into the highlands while some like Phan Rang Cham became a part of the lowland society ruled by the Vietnamese. The division of Cham into Western and Phan Rang Cham immediately followed the Vietnamese overthrow of the last Cham polity.¹¹ The Western Cham people are mostly Muslim¹² and therefore prefer the Arabic script. The Eastern Cham are mostly Hindu and continued to use the Indic script. During French colonial times, both groups had to use the Latin alphabet.

There are two varieties of the Cham script: Akhar Thrah (Eastern Cham) and Akhar Srak (Western Cham). The two are distinct enough to be encoded in separate blocks, the Eastern Cham block included in Unicode Standard version 5.1 since March 2008, the Western Cham block approved but still awaiting inclusion as of late 2023.¹³¹⁴¹⁵ A standard ALA-LC romanization of both varieties, which is based on EFEO romanization of Cham, is available.¹⁶¹⁷

Usage

The script is highly valued in Cham culture, but this does not mean that many people are learning it.¹⁸ There have been efforts to simplify the spelling and to promote learning the script, but these have met with limited success.¹⁹²⁰ Traditionally, boys learned the script around the age of twelve when they were old and strong enough to tend to the water buffalo. However, women and girls did not typically learn to read.²¹ The traditional Indic Cham script is still known and used by Vietnam's Eastern Cham but no longer by the Western Cham.²²

Structure

Similar to other abugidas, the consonants of Cham have the inherent vowel. Dependent vowel diacritics are used to modify the inherent vowel.²³ Since Cham does not have virāma, special characters should be used for pure consonants. This practice is similar to the chillu consonants of the Malayalam script.

Most consonant letters, such as [b], [t], or [p], include an inherent vowel [a] which does not need to be written. The nasal stops, [m], [n], [ɲ], and [ŋ] (the latter two transliterated ny and ng in the Latin alphabet) are exceptions, and have an inherent vowel [ɨ] (transliterated â). A diacritic called kai, which does not occur with the other consonants, is added below a nasal consonant to write the [a] vowel.²⁴

Cham words contain vowel and consonant-vowel (V and CV) syllables, apart from the last, which may also be CVC. There are a few characters for final consonants in the Cham script; other consonants merely extend a longer tail on the right side to indicate the absence of a final vowel.²⁵

Consonants

Medial consonants

Final consonants

Cham does not employ a virama to suppress vowels. Final consonants are indicated in one of three ways: an explicit final consonant letter, a combining diacritic mark, or by ꨥ.

Independent vowels

Six of the initial vowels are represented with unique letters:²⁶

Dependent vowels

Other initial vowels are represented by adding a diacritic to the letter ꨀ (a).²⁷ The same diacritics are used with consonants to change their inherent vowel:

Numerals

Cham has a distinctive set of digits:²⁸

Other symbols

Unicode

Main article: Cham (Unicode block)

Cham script was added to the Unicode Standard in April, 2008 with the release of version 5.1.²⁹

The Unicode block for Cham is U+AA00–U+AA5F:

Sample text

Below is a sample text in Cham, in Rumi, Jawi, and Cham scripts. This text is the translation of a famous Vietnamese short poetry.

Notes

Bibliography

• Marrison, Geoffrey Edward (1975), "The Early Cham language and its relation to Malay", Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 48 (2 (228)): 52–59, JSTOR 41492110
• Etienne Aymonier, Antoine Cabaton (1906). Dictionnaire čam-français. Vol. 7 of Publications de l'École française d'Extrême-Orient. E. Leroux. Retrieved 2011-05-15.
• Blood, Doris (1980a). Cham literacy: the struggle between old and new (a case study). Notes on Literacy 12, 6–9.
• Blood, Doris (1980b). The script as a cohesive factor in Cham society. In Notes from Indochina, Marilyn Gregersen and Dorothy Thomas (eds.), 35–44. Dallas: International Museum of Cultures.
• Blood, Doris E. 2008. The ascendancy of the Cham script: how a literacy workshop became the catalyst. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 192:45-56.
• Brunelle, Marc. 2008. Diglossia, Bilingualism, and the Revitalization of Written Eastern Cham. Language Documentation & Conservation 2.1: 28–46. (Web based journal)
• Moussay, Gerard (1971). Dictionnaire Cam-Vietnamien-Français. Phan Rang: Centre Culturel Cam.
• Trankell, Ing-Britt and Jan Ovesen (2004). Muslim minorities in Cambodia. NIASnytt 4, 22–24. (Also on Web)
• R. Malatesha Joshi, Catherine McBride(2019). Handbook of Literacy in Akshara Orthography

External links

Media related to Cham script at Wikimedia Commons

• Omniglot Entry on Cham
• more info on Cham alphabet (in Spanish)
• Brunelle's article
• Conservation of Cham language and script on Lauthara.org
• https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2022/22095-western-cham.pdf

References

1. Cham. In The Unicode Standard, Version 11.0 (p. 661). Mountain View, CA: Unicode Consortium. ↩

2. Cham. In The Unicode Standard, Version 11.0 (p. 661). Mountain View, CA: Unicode Consortium. ↩

3. Thurgood, Graham. From Ancient Cham to Modern Dialects: Two Thousand Years of Language Contact and Change. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999. ↩

4. Centre, UNESCO World Heritage. "My Son Sanctuary". UNESCO World Heritage Centre. Retrieved 2024-09-11. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/949/ ↩

5. Graham, Thurgood (11 September 2024). A Preliminary Sketch of Phan Rang Cham The Austronesian Languages of Asia and Madagascar (PDF). California State University, Chico. pp. Page=1. https://theswissbay.ch/pdf/Books/Linguistics/Mega%20linguistics%20pack/Austronesia/Cham%2C%20A%20Preliminary%20Sketch%20of%20Phan%20Rang%20%28Thurgood%29.pdf ↩

6. Claude, Jacques. "The Use of Sanskrit in the Khmer and Cham Inscriptions." In Sanskrit Outside India (Vol. 7, pp. 5-12). Leiden: Panels of the VIIth World Sanskrit Conference. 1991. ↩

7. Claude, Jacques. "The Use of Sanskrit in the Khmer and Cham Inscriptions." In Sanskrit Outside India (Vol. 7, pp. 5-12). Leiden: Panels of the VIIth World Sanskrit Conference. 1991. ↩

8. Blood, Doris E. "The Script as a Cohesive Factor in Cham Society". In Notes from Indochina on ethnic minority cultures. Ed. Marilyn Gregerson. 1980 p35-44. ↩

9. Claude, Jacques. "The Use of Sanskrit in the Khmer and Cham Inscriptions." In Sanskrit Outside India (Vol. 7, pp. 5-12). Leiden: Panels of the VIIth World Sanskrit Conference. 1991. ↩

10. Thurgood, Graham. From Ancient Cham to Modern Dialects: Two Thousand Years of Language Contact and Change. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999. ↩

11. Thurgood, Graham. From Ancient Cham to Modern Dialects: Two Thousand Years of Language Contact and Change. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999. ↩

12. Trankell & Ovesen 2004 ↩

13. "Proposal for encoding the Cham script in the BMP of the UCS"[1]. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7nw110n4 ↩

14. Hosken, Martin. (2019). L2/19-217 Proposal to encode Western Cham in the UCS. https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19217-western-cham.pdf ↩

15. Everson, M. & Cunningham, A. (2016). L2/16-198 Proposal to encode Western Cham in the SMP of the UCS. https://unicode.org/L2/L2016/16198-n4734-western-cham.pdf ↩

16. ALA-LC Cham romanization https://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/romanization/cham.pdf ↩

17. "Cham Alphabet". kauthara.org. 2015. Retrieved 2020-07-20. https://kauthara.org/cham-lesson/3 ↩

18. Bruckmayr, Philipp. (2019). The Changing Fates of the Cambodian Islamic Manuscript Tradition. Journal of Islamic Manuscripts, 10(1), 1-23. doi:10.1163/1878464X-01001001 ↩

19. Blood (1980a, 1980b, 2008); Brunelle (2008). ↩

20. Rachna, Thim (26 November 2019). "Cambodia's Cham Muslims Fear Loss of Ancient Script and Language". VOA Khmer. Retrieved 2022-05-18. https://www.voacambodia.com/a/cambodias-cham-muslims-fear-loss-of-ancient-script-and-language/5181319.html ↩

21. Blood, Doris E. "The Script as a Cohesive Factor in Cham Society". In Notes from Indochina on ethnic minority cultures. Ed. Marilyn Gregerson. 1980 p35-44. ↩

22. Akbar Husain, Wim Swann Horizons of Spiritual Psychology 2009 - Page 28 "The traditional Cham script, based on an Indian script, is still known and used by the Eastern Cham in Vietnam, but it has been lost by the Western Cham. The Cham language is also non-tonal. Words may contain one, two, or three syllables." ↩

23. Cham. In The Unicode Standard, Version 11.0 (p. 661). Mountain View, CA: Unicode Consortium. ↩

24. Blood, Doris E. "The Script as a Cohesive Factor in Cham Society". In Notes from Indochina on ethnic minority cultures. Ed. Marilyn Gregerson. 1980 p35-44. ↩

25. Blood, Doris E. "The Script as a Cohesive Factor in Cham Society". In Notes from Indochina on ethnic minority cultures. Ed. Marilyn Gregerson. 1980 p35-44. ↩

26. Everson, Michael (2006-08-06). "Proposal for encoding the Cham script in the BMP of the UCS" (PDF). /wiki/Michael_Everson ↩

27. Everson, Michael (2006-08-06). "Proposal for encoding the Cham script in the BMP of the UCS" (PDF). /wiki/Michael_Everson ↩

28. Everson, Michael (2006-08-06). "Proposal for encoding the Cham script in the BMP of the UCS" (PDF). /wiki/Michael_Everson ↩

29. Everson, Michael (2006-08-06). "Proposal for encoding the Cham script in the BMP of the UCS" (PDF). /wiki/Michael_Everson ↩