User:Amandaxnguyen/sandbox

copied from Cham language.

Cham is the language of the Cham people of Southeast Asia, and formerly the language of the kingdom of Champa in central Vietnam. The gradual disappearance of the Champa community, as a result of Vietnamese invasion, caused a massive departure of Cham speakers throughout Southeast Asia. A member of the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian Family, it is spoken by 204,000 people in Cambodia and 79,000 people in Vietnam. There are also small populations of speakers in Thailand and Malaysia. Cham was the predominant language of the Cham people for most of their recorded history. Other Chamic languages are spoken in Cambodia and/or Vietnam (Raglai, Rade, Jarai, Chru and Haroi), on Hainan(Tsat) and in Aceh, North Sumatra (Acehnese).

History
The traditional Cham script, which holds reminiscence of Sanskrit, dates back to stone inscriptions found in Quảng Nam in the eighth century. Through interactions with outside cultures, the old script gradually transformed into the modern Eastern Cham writing system, akhăr thrah, as attested on a sixteenth century stone inscription at the Po Rome tower in Ninh Thuận. From then on, akhăr thrah was the main Cham written medium from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century, and was used mostly in manuscripts relating to epics and historical events.

From the 15th century on, traditional Cham experienced gradual shifts in the language due many factors. One prominent reason is due to the exposure of the Vietnamese language. Chams who live or work in cities speak Vietnamese most of the time, while rural Cham people living in homogeneous Cham villages rarely speak it at all, but are still passively exposed to Vietnamese daily through mass media. The influence of Vietnamese is further reinforced by the use of it within the school system. Students are given a restricted first-language education to learn Cham, which limits their abilities to learn and retain their native language. Moreover, a large number of Vietnamese lexical items have been replaced by Vietnamese loanwords, to the point that only language specialists remember the original Cham words.