Article

The early Cham language, and its relationship to Malay

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The early Cham language, and its relationship to Malay

G. E. Marrison’s 1975 article examines Cham epigraphic texts from the fourth to the late tenth century A.D. to demonstrate that the early Cham language was closely affiliated with Malay in phonology, vocabulary, and syntax, and that the later divergence of Cham from the Indonesian family was driven primarily by Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer contact. The study draws on a corpus of sixteen inscriptions, the oldest of which is the earliest surviving specimen of any Indonesian language.

Summary

Marrison’s central argument is that the Cham language, as attested in its earliest inscriptions, belongs firmly within the Indonesian language family and that its subsequent differentiation from Malay was a gradual process of phonological erosion and lexical replacement under the pressure of neighbouring Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer languages. The article is structured around a close reading of primary epigraphic texts, beginning with a single undated inscription associated with a well at Dong-yen-chau near Indrapura, whose script matches that of dated Sanskrit inscriptions of Bhadravarman I (late fourth century). Marrison provides a word-by-word gloss of this text, showing that more than half its vocabulary is directly cognate with Malay, with the remainder accounted for by Sanskrit borrowings or a small residue of unexplained forms.

The bulk of the article then turns to sixteen inscriptions of the Sixth Dynasty (875–991 A.D.), ranging from temple dedications and field-endowment lists to royal curses and military narratives. Marrison selects passages from the Nhan Bieu stele (911 A.D.), the Phu Thuan stele (c. 889 A.D.), the Lai Trung curse (921 A.D.), and the Po Klaung Garai inscription (972 A.D.) to illustrate the language’s morphology and lexicon at successive points. A recurring observation is that even in these early texts, certain non-Indonesian tendencies are already incipient: the forward shift of word accent to the final syllable, a consequent drift toward monosyllabism, and a morphological system that employs prefixes and infixes but rejects suffixation altogether—a pattern that aligns Cham with Mon-Khmer rather than with the Indonesian languages.

The article also notes the substantial Sanskrit layer in Cham, covering religious, legal, and administrative terminology in a manner comparable to Old Malay and Old Javanese, confirming that Cham participated in the broader South and Southeast Asian pattern of Sanskrit borrowing associated with Hindu-Buddhist state culture.

Key Findings

  • The undated Dong-yen-chau inscription, attributed to the late fourth century A.D. on palaeographic grounds, is the oldest surviving example of an Indonesian language; more than half its words are cognate with Malay (p. 53).
  • The Sixth Dynasty inscriptions span 875–991 A.D. and include the Nhan Bieu stele (911 A.D.), which enumerates ricefields of the temple of Devalingesvara at Kumuvvel with areas measured in galauk and yields in jak (e.g., 37 galauk producing 10 jak of rice) (p. 56).
  • Cham morphology uses prefixes and infixes but has no system of suffixation, a feature that aligns it with Mon-Khmer rather than with Indonesian languages (p. 54).
  • The Po Klaung Garai inscription of 972 A.D. records the military recovery of Panduranga after a local revolt, providing a narrative text in which words such as luvang vatuv correspond directly to Malay lobang batu (‘holes in the rocks’) (p. 58).
  • The Cham epigraphic record covers the period from the seventh to the thirteenth century A.D., a span for which no direct Malay textual evidence survives, making it coeval with Old and Early Middle Javanese (p. 59).
  • The Cham word asuv (‘dog’) preserves the Common Indonesian form asu, which is taboo in Malay and has been replaced by anjing, surviving only in the compound gigi asu (‘canine tooth’) (p. 57).

Conclusion

Marrison concludes that early Cham is an Indonesian language whose close relationship to Malay is unambiguous in the epigraphic record, but that from the earliest attested stage it already exhibits structural features—final-syllable stress, monosyllabic drift, and a prefix/infix-only affix system—that distinguish it from its Malay relatives and point toward Mon-Khmer influence. The Cham inscriptions thus fill a critical gap in the historical linguistics of the Indonesian family, covering centuries for which no Malay texts exist.

Context

  • The primary sources are Cham and Sanskrit inscriptions previously published by G. Coedes, L. Finot, and E. Huber in the Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient (BEFEO), with Marrison’s contribution being a fresh linguistic analysis rather than new epigraphic discovery.
  • The article extends the comparative work of Niemann (1891), Blagden (1902), and Blood (1963) by shifting the focus from modern Cham to the epigraphic record, thereby isolating the language before the full impact of Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer contact.

References