Paul Sidwell, Project Director

Introduction For more than two millennia, through the rise and fall of the Dvaravati and Angkor empires, the Mon-Khmer languages were the lingua franca of Southeast Asia.  They are as key to interpreting the region's cultural, political, and economic history as Greek or Latin are to understanding Europe, both in their own right, and for their record of contact with Chinese, Tai, Cham, Sanskrit, and other regional language families.

Today, some 150 Mon-Khmer languages are still spoken across China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, and India.  Many of them are found only in isolated communities and are highly endangered.  Even when they are national langauges like Khmer or Vietnamese, or official state languages, as Wa and Mon are in Burma, their speakers are bitterly separated by modern political divisions, and know little of their shared linguistic histories.

A shortage of data is not the problem - accessibility and analysis are.  Data that has been gathered for a hundred years lies scattered across hundreds of monographs, word lists, glossaries, and theses.  Much is known about the Mon-Khmer languages, but this knowledge is not reflected in modern dictionaries, nor is it readily available to historians and anthropologists, linguists, and lexicographers.

The Mon-Khmer Languages Project The Mon-Khmer Languages project is assembling this data, and building the tools needed to access, analyze, and extend it.

the Mon-Khmer languages database will make all language reference materials, including vernacular orthography (when available), phonetic transcription, glosses, unique identifying numbers, and citations, freely available.

the Mon-Khmer etymological dictionary will provide an on-line hierarchical reference that puts language data in context. It will be based on - but greatly extend - H.L. Shorto's Mon-Khmer Comparative Dictionary.

finally, the Mon-Khmer languages website will supply an open architecture for access, analysis, comment, and correction, including tools for collaboration and peer certification of user contributions.

The detailed overview of Mon-Khmer languages we provide will make a critical contribution to language-specific preservation and recording projects, including Tai-Kadai and Tibeto-Burman family languages.