Khmer script
Brahmic script based on a abugida, used in Vietnam and Cambodia for texts written in Khmer, Pali, Sanskrit, Jarai, or Tamil language
Khmer script (Khmer: អក្សរខ្មែរ, Âksâr Khmêr [ʔaksɑː kʰmae]) is an abugida (alphasyllabary) script used to write the Khmer language, the official language of Cambodia. It is also used to write Pali in the Buddhist liturgy of Cambodia and Thailand.
Khmer is written from left to right. Words within the same sentence or phrase are generally run together with no spaces between them. Consonant clusters within a word are "stacked", with the second (and occasionally third) consonant being written in reduced form under the main consonant. Originally there were 35 consonant characters, but modern Khmer uses only 33. Each character represents a consonant sound together with an inherent vowel, either â or ô; in many cases, in the absence of another vowel mark, the inherent vowel is to be pronounced after the consonant.
There are some independent vowel characters, but vowel sounds are more commonly represented as dependent vowels, additional marks accompanying a consonant character, and indicating what vowel sound is to be pronounced after that consonant (or consonant cluster). Most dependent vowels have two different pronunciations, depending in most cases on the inherent vowel of the consonant to which they are added. There are also a number of diacritics used to indicate further modifications in pronunciation.
“Khmer script” enters the record as brahmic script based on a abugida, used in Vietnam and Cambodia for texts written in Khmer, Pali, Sanskrit, Jarai, or Tamil language. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Khmer, script and Brahmic can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1054190. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Khmer script” 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.