The Bahnaric languages are a group of about thirty
Austroasiatic languages spoken by about 700,000 people in
Vietnam,
Cambodia, and
Laos.
Paul Sidwell notes that Austroasiatic/
Mon–Khmer languages are lexically more similar to Bahnaric and
Katuic languages the closer they are geographically, independently of which branch of the family they belong to, but that Bahnaric and Katuic do not have any
shared innovations that would suggest that together they form a branch of the Austroasiatic family, rather forming separate branches.
Internal controversy
Internal diversity suggests that the family broke up about 3,000 years ago.[citation needed] North Bahnaric is characterized by a
register contrast between
breathy and
modal voice, which in Sedang has tensed to become modal–
creaky voice.
Lamam is a clan name of the neighboring Tampuon and Kaco’.
Sidwell (2009) tentatively classifies the Bahnaric languages into four branches, with
Cua (Kor) classified independently as East Bahnaric.[1][2]
North Bahnaric consists of a
dialect chain spoken to the north of the
Chamic languages.[4] Sedang and Hre have the most speakers, each with about 100,000.
Other Northern Bahnaric languages, too poorly known to classify further, are
Duan and
Katua.
West Bahnaric
West Bahnaric is a dialect chain to the west of North Bahnaric,[5] Unlike the other Bahnaric languages to the east, the West Bahnaric languages were under Khmer rather than Chamic influence, and also by the Katuic languages as part of a Katuic-West Bahnaric sprachbund (Sidwell 2003).
Sidwell (2003) proposes the following West Bahnaric groupings, with Lavi branching off first, Jru'/Laven, Su', and Juk as forming a branch that had branched off secondarily, and the rest within a core group.
Jru' and
Brao each have tens of thousands of speakers, while the other languages have no more than 1,000 speakers each.
Kassang is a Bahnaric language (Sidwell 2003), though Ethnologue lists it as
Katuic.
Sidwell (2002, quoted in Sidwell 2003) gives the following classification for the Central Bahnaric languages.[7] Note that Sidwell (2009) later classifies
Cua as an independent branch, namely East Bahnaric.
^Sidwell, Paul. 2015. "Austroasiatic classification." In Jenny, Mathias and Paul Sidwell, eds (2015). The Handbook of Austroasiatic Languages. Leiden: Brill.