The Cham script is a

Brahmic The Brahmic scripts, also known as Indic scripts, are a family of abugida writing systems. They are used throughout the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and parts of East Asia. They are descended from the Brahmi script of ancient India ...

abugida An abugida (, from Ge'ez language, Ge'ez: ), sometimes known as alphasyllabary, neosyllabary or pseudo-alphabet, is a segmental Writing systems#Segmental writing system, writing system in which consonant-vowel sequences are written as units; ...

used to write

Cham Cham or CHAM may refer to: Ethnicities and languages *Chams, people in Vietnam and Cambodia **Cham language, the language of the Cham people ***Cham script ***Cham (Unicode block), a block of Unicode characters of the Cham script *Cham Albanian ...

, an Austronesian language spoken by some 245,000

Chams The Cham (Cham: ''Čaṃ'') or Champa people (Cham: , ''Urang Campa''; vi, Người Chăm or ; km, ជនជាតិចាម, ) are an Austronesian ethnic group. From the 2nd century to 1832 the Cham populated Champa, a contiguous territo ...

Vietnam Vietnam or Viet Nam ( vi, Việt Nam, ), officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,., group="n" is a country in Southeast Asia, at the eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia, with an area of and population of 96 million, making i ...

and

Cambodia Cambodia (; also Kampuchea ; km, កម្ពុជា, UNGEGN: ), officially the Kingdom of Cambodia, is a country located in the southern portion of the Indochinese Peninsula in Southeast Asia, spanning an area of , bordered by Thailand t ...

. It is written horizontally left to right, just like other Brahmic abugidas.

History

The Cham script is a descendant of the

Brahmi script Brahmi (; ; ISO: ''Brāhmī'') is a writing system of ancient South Asia. "Until the late nineteenth century, the script of the Aśokan (non-Kharosthi) inscriptions and its immediate derivatives was referred to by various names such as 'lath' o ...

of India.Cham. In ''The Unicode Standard, Version 11.0'' (p. 661). Mountain View, CA: Unicode Consortium. Cham was one of the first scripts to develop from a script called the

Pallava script The Pallava script or Pallava Grantha, is a Brahmic scripts, Brahmic script, named after the Pallava dynasty of South India, attested since the 4th century AD. As epigrapher Arlo Griffiths makes clear, however, the term is misleading as not all o ...

some time around 200 CE. It came to Southeast Asia as part of the expansion of

Hinduism Hinduism () is an Indian religion or '' dharma'', a religious and universal order or way of life by which followers abide. As a religion, it is the world's third-largest, with over 1.2–1.35 billion followers, or 15–16% of the global p ...

and

Buddhism Buddhism ( , ), also known as Buddha Dharma and Dharmavinaya (), is an Indian religion or philosophical tradition based on teachings attributed to the Buddha. It originated in northern India as a -movement in the 5th century BCE, and gra ...

. Hindu stone temples of the

Champa Champa (Cham: ꨌꩌꨛꨩ; km, ចាម្ប៉ា; vi, Chiêm Thành or ) were a collection of independent Cham polities that extended across the coast of what is contemporary central and southern Vietnam from approximately the 2nd cen ...

civilization contain both

Sanskrit Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...

and Chamic language stone inscriptions.Thurgood, Graham. ''From Ancient Cham to Modern Dialects: Two Thousand Years of Language Contact and Change''. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999. The earliest inscriptions in Vietnam are found in

Mỹ Sơn Mỹ Sơn () is a cluster of abandoned and partially ruined Hindu temples in central Vietnam, constructed between the 4th and the 14th century by the Kings of Champa, an Indianized kingdom of the Cham people. The temples are dedicated to the wo ...

, a temple complex dated to around 400 CE. The oldest inscription is written in faulty Sanskrit. After this, inscriptions alternate between Sanskrit and the Cham language of the times.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. Cham kings studied classical Indian texts such as the ''

Dharmaśāstra ''Dharmaśāstra'' ( sa, धर्मशास्त्र) is a genre of Sanskrit texts on law and conduct, and refers to the treatises (shastras, śāstras) on dharma. Unlike Dharmasūtra which are based upon Vedas, these texts are mainly b ...

'' and inscriptions make reference to

Sanskrit literature Sanskrit literature broadly comprises all literature in the Sanskrit language. This includes texts composed in the earliest attested descendant of the Proto-Indo-Aryan language known as Vedic Sanskrit, texts in Classical Sanskrit as well as s ...

. 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. By the 8th century, the Cham script had outgrown Sanskrit and the Cham language was in full use. Most preserved manuscripts focus on religious rituals, epic battles and poems, and myths. Modern Chamic languages have the Southeast Asian

areal features In geolinguistics, areal features are elements shared by languages or dialects in a geographic area, particularly when such features are not descended from a proto-language, or, common ancestor language. That is, an areal feature is contrasted to ...

monosyllabic In linguistics, a monosyllable is a word or utterance of only one syllable. It is most commonly studied in the fields of phonology and morphology and it has no semantic content. The word has originated from the Greek language. "Yes", "no", "jump", ...

ity,

tonality Tonality is the arrangement of pitches and/or chords of a musical work in a hierarchy of perceived relations, stabilities, attractions and directionality. In this hierarchy, the single pitch or triadic chord with the greatest stability is call ...

, 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.

Variety

The Cham now live in two groups: the Western Cham of Cambodia and the Eastern Cham (Phan Rang Cham) of Vietnam. For the first millennium AD, the

Chamic languages The Chamic languages, also known as Aceh–Chamic and Achinese–Chamic, are a group of ten languages spoken in Aceh (Sumatra, Indonesia) and in parts of Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam and Hainan, China. The Chamic languages are a subgroup of Mala ...

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. The Western Cham people are mostly

Muslim Muslims ( ar, المسلمون, , ) are people who adhere to Islam, a monotheistic religion belonging to the Abrahamic tradition. They consider the Quran, the foundational religious text of Islam, to be the verbatim word of the God of Abrah ...

and therefore prefer the

Arabic script The Arabic script is the writing system used for Arabic and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used writing system in the world by number of countries using it or a script directly derived from it, and the ...

. The Eastern Cham are mostly

Hindu Hindus (; ) are people who religiously adhere to Hinduism.Jeffery D. Long (2007), A Vision for Hinduism, IB Tauris, , pages 35–37 Historically, the term has also been used as a geographical, cultural, and later religious identifier for ...

and continued to use the Indic script. During French colonial times, both groups had to use the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the o ...

. 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. A standard

ALA-LC romanization ALA-LC (American Library AssociationLibrary of Congress) is a set of standards for romanization, the representation of text in other writing systems using the Latin script. Applications The system is used to represent bibliographic information by ...

of both varieties, which is based on EFEO romanization of Cham, is available.

Usage

The script is highly valued in Cham culture, but this does not mean that many people are learning it. There have been efforts to simplify the spelling and to promote learning the script, but these have met with limited success. 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.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. The traditional Indic Cham script is still known and used by Vietnam's Eastern Cham but no longer by the Western Cham.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."

Structure

Similar to other abugidas, the consonants of Cham have the inherent vowel. Dependent vowel diacritics are used to modify the inherent vowel. 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 , , or , includes an

inherent vowel An inherent vowel is part of an abugida (or alphasyllabary) script. It is a vowel sound which is used with each unmarked or basic consonant symbol. For example, if the Latin alphabet used 'i' as an inherent vowel, "Wikipedia" could be rendered as "W ...

which does not need to be written. The

nasal stops In phonetics, a nasal, also called a nasal occlusive or nasal stop in contrast with an oral stop or nasalized consonant, is an occlusive consonant produced with a lowered velum, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The vast majorit ...

, , , , and (the latter two transliterated ''ny'' and ''ng'' in the Latin alphabet) are exceptions, and have an inherent vowel (transliterated ''â''). A diacritic called ''kai,'' which does not occur with the other consonants, is added below a nasal consonant to write the vowel. 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.

Consonants

Medial consonants

Final consonants

Cham does not employ a

virama Virama ( ्) is a Sanskrit phonological concept to suppress the inherent vowel that otherwise occurs with every consonant letter, commonly used as a generic term for a codepoint in Unicode, representing either # halanta, hasanta or explicit virā ...

to suppress vowels. Final consonants are indicated in one of three ways: an explicit final consonant letter, a combining diacritic mark, or by .

Independent vowels

Six of the initial vowels are represented with unique letters:

Dependent vowels

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

Numerals

Cham has a distinctive set of digits:

Other symbols

Unicode

Cham script was added to the

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...

Standard in April, 2008 with the release of version 5.1. The Unicode block for Cham is U+AA00–U+AA5F:

Notes

References

Bibliography

* * *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

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 {{DEFAULTSORT:Cham Script Brahmic scripts