Knowledgebase
Viewing articles tagged 'chamic'
Viewing articles tagged 'chamic'
5 articles
Before history: the stone and bronze ages of the plateau
Seven thousand years ago people were living in the lava caves at Krong No, burying their dead in a flexed position, cooking at hearths and wearing ornaments made from sea-snail shells carried a hundred kilometers from the coast. That is the best-dated thing we have. Out at the edges the claims get bigger and the ground gets softer: stone tools a...
The tribes and their languages
Around thirty peoples, in two language families that are not related to one another. The Chamic-speaking peoples, Jarai, Rhade, Raglai, Chu Ru and Haroi, are Austronesian, cousins of the Cham of the coast and, further out, of Malay and Indonesian. Most of the rest speak Bahnaric languages of the Austroasiatic family, related to Khmer; the Bru, K...
The Rhade (Êđê)
The Rhade are the people of the Darlac plateau, the red basalt shelf around Buon Ma Thuot where the Krong Ana, the female river, joins the Krong No, the male river, and becomes the Srepok. They speak a Chamic language, cousin to Cham and more distantly to Malay. They count descent through women: a house belongs to its women, land belongs to a wo...
The Jarai
The Jarai are the largest of our peoples and the largest Chamic-speaking people on the mainland — larger than the Rhade, and far larger than the Cham themselves. Their country is the Pleiku plateau and the valleys falling away from it into the Ayun and the Ba, and it does not stop at the border: a fifth of Ratanakiri province in Cambodia is Jara...
The Koho, Maa, Churu and Raglai
Four peoples hold the southern end of our country, from the Lang Biang plateau around Da Lat down to the hills behind the old Cham coast. Two of them, the Koho and the Ma, speak Mon-Khmer languages and are close kin. Two of them, the Churu and the Raglai, speak languages almost identical with Cham. The Koho and the Ma are easy to run together, a...
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