Stieng (,

Vietnamese Vietnamese may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Vietnam, a country in Southeast Asia ** A citizen of Vietnam. See Demographics of Vietnam. * Vietnamese people, or Kinh people, a Southeast Asian ethnic group native to Vietnam ** Overse ...

: Xtiêng, Khmer: ) is the language of the

Stieng people The Stieng people ( vi, Xtiêng) are an ethnic group of Vietnam and Cambodia. They speak Stieng, a language in the Bahnaric group of the Mon–Khmer languages. Most Stieng live in Bình Phước Province (81,708 in 2009) of the Southeast Th ...

of southern

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 adjacent areas of

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 ...

, and possibly Laos (under the name Tariang). Along with Chrau and Mnong, Stieng is classified as a language of the South Bahnaric grouping of the

Mon–Khmer languages The Austroasiatic languages , , are a large language family in Mainland Southeast Asia and South Asia. These languages are scattered throughout parts of Thailand, Laos, India, Myanmar, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Nepal, and southern China and are t ...

within the

Austroasiatic The Austroasiatic languages , , are a large language family A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The te ...

language family. In the Austroasiatic scheme, the Bahnaric languages are often cited as being most closely related to the Khmer language. There are noted dialects of Stieng, some of which may not be mutually intelligible. However, due to the lack of widely available research, this article will primarily describe the dialect known as Bulo Stieng spoken in the provinces of Bình Phước, Lâm Đồng,

Tây Ninh Tây Ninh () is a provincial city in south-eastern Vietnam. It is the capital of Tây Ninh Province, which encompasses the town and much of the surrounding farmland. Tây Ninh is approximately to the northwest of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam's lar ...

in southwestern Vietnam and Kratié (Snuol District) and Mondulkiri provinces in adjacent areas of eastern Cambodia.Haupers, Ralph. "Stieng Phonemes." The Mon-Khmer Studies Journal. 3. (1969): 131-137.Ethnologue
/ref> Bulo Stieng is spoken in more remote areas of the mountains and jungles alongside its close relative, Mnong. Other dialects, including Bu Dek and Bu Biek, are spoken in the lowlands and exhibit more influence from Vietnamese. Unlike many other Mon–Khmer languages, Stieng does not distinguish

voice quality The term phonation has slightly different meanings depending on the subfield of phonetics. Among some phoneticians, ''phonation'' is the process by which the vocal folds produce certain sounds through quasi-periodic vibration. This is the defin ...

, nor is it a tonal language like Vietnamese. Words may be either

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", ...

sesquisyllabic Primarily in Austroasiatic languages (also known as Mon–Khmer), in a typical word a minor syllable is a reduced (minor) syllable followed by a full tonic or stressed syllable. The minor syllable may be of the form or , with a reduced vowel, as ...

Phonology

Consonants

Haupers (1969) analyzes Stieng as having 25 consonant phonemes with three-way contrasts of

voiced Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced. The term, however, is used to refer ...

unvoiced In linguistics, voicelessness is the property of sounds being pronounced without the larynx vibrating. Phonologically, it is a type of phonation, which contrasts with other states of the larynx, but some object that the word phonation implies v ...

and pre-glottalized with aspiration described as a consonant cluster involving simple (i.e. not pre-glottalized) stops plus . Analyses which include the aspirated series as independent phonemes yield 33 consonants and a five-way contrast. Consonants appearing in syllable coda are devoiced and unreleased. For the alveolar approximate, the trilled is found in

free variation In linguistics, free variation is the phenomenon of two (or more) sounds or forms appearing in the same environment without a change in meaning and without being considered incorrect by native speakers. Sociolinguists argue that describing such v ...

with the flapped . The voiceless palatal fricative appears only in syllable coda as a

complementary A complement is something that completes something else. Complement may refer specifically to: The arts * Complement (music), an interval that, when added to another, spans an octave ** Aggregate complementation, the separation of pitch-class ...

allophone of .

Vowels

The Stieng vowel system consists of fifteen

monophthong A monophthong ( ; , ) is a pure vowel sound, one whose articulation at both beginning and end is relatively fixed, and which does not glide up or down towards a new position of articulation. The monophthongs can be contrasted with diphthongs, wh ...

s and two

diphthong A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech o ...

s. In addition to vowel quality, quantitative length (duration) is also phonemic for vowels other than in closed syllables. The vowel is short before and long elsewhere. This lack of

minimal pair In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, spoken or signed, that differ in only one phonological element, such as a phoneme, toneme or chroneme, and have distinct meanings. They are used to demonstrate th ...

s for and suggests that , , and are all

allophone In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor ''phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in ''s ...

s. Symbols in parenthesis represent allophonic variations.

References

Languages of Cambodia Languages of Vietnam Bahnaric languages {{AustroAsiatic-lang-stub