Jarai language
Malayo-Polynesian language spoken by the Jarai people of Vietnam and Cambodia
Jarai (; Vietnamese: tiếng Gia Rai or Tiếng Jrai; Khmer: ចារ៉ាយ, Charay [caːraːj]) is a Malayo-Polynesian language spoken by the Jarai people of Vietnam and Cambodia. The speakers of Jarai number approximately 530,000, not including other possible Jarai communities in countries other than Vietnam and Cambodia such as United States of America. They are the largest of the upland ethnic groups of Vietnam's Central Highlands known as Degar or Montagnards, and 25 per cent of the population in the Cambodian province of Ratanakiri.
The language is in the Chamic subgroup of the Malayo-Polynesian languages, and is thus related to the Cham language of central Vietnam.
A number of Jarai also live in the United States, having resettled there following the Vietnam War.
Classification
The Jarai language belongs to Chamic branch of the Malayo-Polynesian languages. Although often classified as a Mon-Khmer language until the 20th century, the affiliation of Jarai to the Chamic sister languages Cham and Rade, and a wider connection to Malay was already recognized as early as 1864.
Geographic distribution and dialects
Jarai is spoken by some 262,800 people in Cambodia and Vietnam (Simons, 2017), where it is recognized as an official minority language, although in Cambodia it does not have its own Khmer scripts orthography. Additionally, there are several hundred Jarai speakers in the United States of America, as a result of the Jarai refugees settling in the USA after the Vietnamese War. Jarai dialects can be mutually unintelligible.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q33370. Authority coordinates are 13.620, 107.810. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1864 and 2017.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jarai language” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.