Old Khmer

Old Khmer is the oldest attested stage of the Khmer language, an Austroasiatic language historically and presently spoken across Cambodia, Southern Vietnam, and parts of Thailand and Laos. It is recorded in inscriptions dating from the early 7th century until the first few decades of the 15th century. Such inscriptions, spanning nearly a millennium and numbering well over a thousand, present one of the most extensive sources of documentation in Southeast Asia.

Old Khmer was written in an early variant of the Khmer script derived from Pallava, a southern variant of Brahmi, and in turn became the basis of the scripts used for Thai and Lao. Along with Brahmi and Indian influence on Cambodia, Old Khmer saw an influx of Sanskrit loanwords in the domains of religion, philosophy, and to a lesser extent, in politics. Despite this, Old Khmer retained a prototypical Austroasiatic typology in phonology, syntax, and morphology, being sesquisyllabic, analytic, having a rich system of derivational affixes.^[1]

The language is customarily divided into Pre-Angkorian (611–802) and Angkorian (802–1431) stages based on both the date and the distribution of surviving inscriptions, with Pre-Angkorian inscriptions concentrated in the southern regions of Cambodia. After the abandonment of the sites of Angkor as the political centre of the Khmer-speaking polity, the practice of epigraphy decreased in the following centuries but did not disappear, persisting until the 20th century.^[2] However, inscriptions after the 15th century are customarily held to reflect the Middle Khmer stage of the language.^[1]