ABSTRACT
The extraordinary French scholar Çoedès noted that Cham is the earliest attested Austronesian language. Çoedès dated the Cham inscription found at Trakiêu near the old Cham capital of Indrapura as being from the middle of the fourth century, describing the inscription as ‘the oldest text, presently known, written in a Malayo-Polynesian dialect’ (Çoedès 1939). The language of the text is associated with the once flourishing kingdom of Champa, a kingdom first mentioned by the Chinese ca. 190-193. Champa reached its zenith about the sixth century, continuing to flourish until the Vietnamese ‘push to the South’ in the tenth century began its slow demise. At the time of the first inscriptions, the Chamic languages were still a largely undifferentiated dialect continuum, but in the subsequent 1500 or so years of change, realignments in patterns of affiliation and language contact restructured stretches of the original dialect chain into distinct languages and distributed the speakers over a much wider area. No longer functioning as the lingua franca of the kingdom of Champa, Chamic lives on in its modern descendants: the Tsat spoken on Hainan, the Rade, Jarai, Haroi, Chru, and Roglai spoken in the southern Vietnam highlands, the Phan Rang Cham spoken in Vietnam, the various Western Cham communities of Cambodia, and the Acehnese of north Sumatra.
