The Cham script ( Cham: ) is a Brahmic

abugida An abugida (; from Geʽez: , )sometimes also called alphasyllabary, neosyllabary, or pseudo-alphabetis a segmental Writing systems#Segmental writing system, writing system in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as units; each unit ...

used to write Cham, an

Austronesian language The Austronesian languages ( ) are a language family widely spoken throughout Maritime Southeast Asia, parts of Mainland Southeast Asia, Madagascar, the islands of the Pacific Ocean and Taiwan (by Taiwanese indigenous peoples). They are spoken b ...

spoken by some 245,000

Chams The Chams ( Cham: , چام, ''cam''), or Champa people ( Cham: , اوراڠ چمڤا, ''Urang Campa''; or ; , ), are an Austronesian ethnic group in Southeast Asia and are the original inhabitants of central Vietnam and coastal Cambodia be ...

Vietnam Vietnam, officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV), is a country at the eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia, with an area of about and a population of over 100 million, making it the world's List of countries and depende ...

and

Cambodia Cambodia, officially the Kingdom of Cambodia, is a country in Southeast Asia on the Mainland Southeast Asia, Indochinese Peninsula. It is bordered by Thailand to the northwest, Laos to the north, and Vietnam to the east, and has a coastline ...

. 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 15919, ISO: ''Brāhmī'') is a writing system from ancient India. "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 ...

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 the Pallava script, this happened in the mid 350s CE. It came to Southeast Asia as part of the expansion of

Hinduism Hinduism () is an Hypernymy and hyponymy, umbrella term for a range of Indian religions, Indian List of religions and spiritual traditions#Indian religions, religious and spiritual traditions (Sampradaya, ''sampradaya''s) that are unified ...

and

Buddhism Buddhism, also known as Buddhadharma and Dharmavinaya, is an Indian religion and List of philosophies, philosophical tradition based on Pre-sectarian Buddhism, teachings attributed to the Buddha, a wandering teacher who lived in the 6th or ...

. Hindu stone temples of the

Champa Champa (Cham language, Cham: ꨌꩌꨛꨩ, چمڤا; ; 占城 or 占婆) was a collection of independent Chams, Cham Polity, polities that extended across the coast of what is present-day Central Vietnam, central and southern Vietnam from ...

civilization contain both

Sanskrit Sanskrit (; stem form ; nominal singular , ,) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in northwest South Asia after its predecessor languages had Trans-cultural ...

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, a temple complex dating from CE to 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'' () are Sanskrit Puranic Smriti texts on law and conduct, and refer to treatises (shastras, śāstras) on Dharma. Like Dharmasūtra which are based upon Vedas, these texts are also elaborate law commentaries based on vedas, D ...

'', and inscriptions make reference to

Sanskrit literature Sanskrit literature is a broad term for all literature composed in Sanskrit. 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 some ...

. 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 of

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. The word has originated from the Greek language Greek (, ; , ) is an Indo-European languages, Ind ...

ity,

tonality Tonality is the arrangement of pitch (music), pitches and / or chord (music), chords of a musical work in a hierarchy of perceived ''relations'', ''stabilities'', ''attractions'', and ''directionality''. In this hierarchy, the single pitch or ...

, 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 (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. The Western Cham people are mostly

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

and therefore prefer the

Arabic script The Arabic script is the writing system used for Arabic (Arabic alphabet) and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world (after the Latin script), the second-most widel ...

. The Eastern Cham are mostly

Hindu Hindus (; ; also known as Sanātanīs) are people who religiously adhere to Hinduism, also known by its endonym Sanātana Dharma. Jeffery D. Long (2007), A Vision for Hinduism, IB Tauris, , pp. 35–37 Historically, the term has also be ...

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

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...

. 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. 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 Malayalam script (; / ) is a Brahmic scripts, Brahmic script used to write Malayalam, the principal language of Kerala, India, spoken by 45 million people. It is a Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union ter ...

. Most consonant letters, such as , , or , include 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. There are many known abugida scripts, including most of the Brahmic scripts and Kharosthi, the c ...

which does not need to be written. The nasal stops, , , , 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 vir ...

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 or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

Standard in April, 2008 with the release of version 5.1. 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

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 Writing systems introduced in the 1st millennium 350s establishments Chamic languages Sanskrit transliteration