Khmer language

Phonology

Modern Standard Khmer has the following consonant and vowel phonemes.

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(Please note: The phonological system described here is the inventory of sounds of the spoken language, not how they are written in the Khmer alphabet.)

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Consonants

The consonants {{IPA|/f/}}, {{IPA|/ʃ/}}, {{IPA|/z/}} and {{IPA|/g/}} occur only in loanwords from French and other recent introductions.

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Vowel nuclei

It must be noted that the precise number and the phonetic value of vowel nuclei vary from dialect to dialect.

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Syllables and words

Khmer words are predominantly of one or two syllables. There are 85 possible clusters of two consonants at the beginning of syllables and two three-consonant clusters with phonetic alterations as shown below:

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Syllables begin with one of these consonants or consonant clusters, followed by one of the vowel nuclei. When the vowel nucleus is short, there has to be a final consonant.

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The most common word structure in Khmer is a full syllable as described above, preceded by an unstressed, ?minor? syllable that has a consonant-vowel (CV) structure CV-, CrV-, CVN- or CrVN- (N is any nasal in the Khmer inventory). The vowel in these ?minor? syllables is usually reduced to {{IPA|}} in the spoken language.

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Words can also be made up of two full syllables.

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Words with three or more syllables are mostly loanwords from other languages, usually Pali, Sanskrit, or French.

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