What Did You Just Say?

Many people, when visiting a region, like to have a few words of the local language in hand in order to streamline getting around or to exchange pleasantries with the locals.

If one plans to spend any length of time in a country, learning a language becomes more important, if only to streamline your shopping trips. For the most part, people are accepting of any attempt to speak their language, although you may get a few blank stares as you struggle along the lower part of the learning curve. The good news is that many of Southeast Asia’s languages are related to each other. Thai and Lao are mutually intelligible to native speakers, and Malay and Indonesian share over 80% of their vocabularies.

Here’s a brief overview of what I know about some of Southeast Asia’s languages:

Khmer is the only mainland Southeast Asian language that is not tonal. However, it is written in a syllabic script, meaning that learning it in any depth would require the mastery of a new way of writing. Khmer has no cases or genders as in Spanish or French. Rather, separate words are placed in front of a noun to show its number, or verb to show its tense.

Vietnamese has a similar structure to Khmer, but is spoken with tones. That means that a word that is spelled similarly can be spoken in a different pitch to change its meaning. This is quite a difficulty for Western learners at first, but becomes much easier with practice. Another important element of Vietnamese is that it is written in a Roman script, meaning that English speakers do not have to learn a new alphabet in order to master the language. Also, all words have only one syllable, meaning that there is no long words to memorize.

Thai is another tonal language, although many people tell me that speakers who have not yet mastered the tones are understood quite well by native Thai speakers through context. However, Thai, like Khmer, is written in a syllabic script (which is quite complex to learn, especially because there are no spaces between words), although there are several methods of Romanizing the language. No method is universally recognized, so you may see several different spelling for the same word.

Indonesian and Malaysian are quite easy to learn. There are no tones and the languages are written using the roman alphabet. Words are given more specific meanings (tense, number, etc...) by adding prefixes onto the stem word. This language has a learning curve which steepens as times goes on. For tourists looking to learn some basic phrases, however, Malay and Indonesian are probably the easiest the put to use.

The different dialects of Chinese are similar in structure to Vietnamese. The advantage of learning these languages (namely Mandarin or Cantonese) is that there exists several well established and widely accepted ways of translating the languages phonetically into Roman script.