ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the document education policy developments in Cambodia from the 1990s until 2015 and discusses the use of different languages in Cambodian education. It analyses the reasons for the country’s progress towards increasingly pluralistic language education policies. The Kingdom of Cambodia, like many of its Southeast Asian neighbours, has a self-evident dominant ethnolinguistic community, the Khmer, whose language has been made the national and official language. The Khmer language was apparently the main oral language of the general public in the kingdoms, and other languages such as Cham, Lao, Thai, Vietnamese, and smaller, mostly Austro-Asiatic languages were probably also spoken by some inhabitants. French, Khmer, Vietnamese, and English have been used as languages of higher education in different times in recent Cambodian history. The chapter explores the changing role and status of Cambodia’s national language, Khmer, and dominant international languages, namely French and English, in Cambodia over time.
