Mon language

Mon was classified as a "vulnerable" language in UNESCO's 2010 Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. The Mon language has faced assimilative pressures in both Myanmar and Thailand, where many individuals of Mon descent are now monolingual in Burmese or Thai respectively. In 2007, Mon speakers were estimated to number between 1,800,000 and 2 million. In Myanmar, the majority of Mon speakers live in Southern Myanmar, especially Mon State, followed by Tanintharyi Region and Kayin State.

History

Burma

Until the 12th century, Mon was the lingua franca of the Irrawaddy valley, not only in the Mon kingdoms of the lower Irrawaddy but also in the upriver Pagan Kingdom of the Bamar people. Mon, especially written Mon, continued to be a prestige language even after the fall of the Mon kingdom of Thaton to Pagan in 1057. King Kyansittha of Pagan (r. 1084–1113) admired Mon culture and the Mon language was patronized.

Kyansittha left many inscriptions in Mon. During this period, the Myazedi inscription, which contains identical inscriptions of a story in Pali, Pyu, Mon and Burmese on the four sides, was carved. Old Mon Jātaka glosses of the 11th and 12th centuries are documented at Pagan, on the Ananda plaques and as ink glosses at West Taungbi and on the west wall of the Lokahteikpan, each naming the Jātaka and then the Bodhisatta. However, after Kyansittha's death, usage of the Mon language declined among the Bamar and the Burmese language began to replace Mon and Pyu as a lingua franca.

After the fall of Pagan, Mon again became the lingua franca of the Hanthawaddy kingdom (1287–1539) in present-day Lower Myanmar. The region remained predominantly Mon-speaking until the 1800s, by which point the Burmese language had expanded from its heartland in Upper Burma into Lower Burma.

The region's language shift from Mon to Burmese has been ascribed to a combination of population displacement, intermarriage, and voluntary changes in self-identification among increasingly Mon–Burmese bilingual populations throughout Lower Burma. The shift was accelerated by the fall of the Mon-speaking Restored Hanthawaddy Kingdom in 1757. Following the fall of Pegu (now Bago), many Mon-speaking refugees fled and resettled in what is now modern-day Thailand. By 1830, an estimated 90% of the population in the Lower Burma self-identified as Burmese-speaking Bamars. Huge swaths of former Mon-speaking areas were now Burmese-speaking, from the Irrawaddy Delta upriver, spanning Bassein (now Pathein) and Rangoon (now Yangon) to Tharrawaddy, Toungoo, Prome (now Pyay) and Henzada (now Hinthada). Great Britain's gradual annexation of Burma throughout the 19th century also accelerated the migration of Burmese speakers from Upper Burma into Lower Burma. So did the economic and political instability in Upper Burma that came with it, among it increased tax burdens to the Burmese crown and British rice production incentives.

The Mon language has influenced subtle grammatical differences between the varieties of Burmese spoken in Lower and Upper Burma. In Lower Burmese varieties, the verb ပေး ("to give") is colloquially used as a permissive causative marker, like in other Southeast Asian languages, but unlike in other Tibeto-Burman languages. This usage is hardly employed in Upper Burmese varieties, and is considered a sub-standard construct.

In 1972, the New Mon State Party (NMSP) established a Mon national school system, which uses Mon as a medium of instruction, in rebel-controlled areas. The system was expanded throughout Mon State following a ceasefire with the central government in 1995. Mon State now operates a multi-track education system, with schools either using Mon as the primary medium of instruction, called Mon national schools, or offering modules on the Mon language alongside the government curriculum, called mixed schools. In 2015, Mon language courses were launched state-wide at the elementary level. This system has been recognized as a model for mother-tongue education in the Burmese national education system, because it enables children taught in the Mon language to integrate into the mainstream Burmese education system at higher education levels.

In 2013, it was announced that the Mawlamyine-based Thanlwin Times would begin to carry news in the Mon language, becoming Myanmar's first Mon language publication since 1962.

Thailand

Mon inscriptions associated with Dvaravati sites have also been found across Thailand. Their presence, however, does not establish the ethnic identity of the inhabitants, who may have included Mon, Khmer, Malay, or mixed populations. Cœdès, reported by Lawrence Palmer Briggs, held that Lavo and Haripuñjaya were independent Mon kingdoms. An inscription of about 1014, K.1198, names Rāmanya as a territory Suryavarman I is said to have given Lakṣmīpativarman to govern and revive. Whether Rāmanya denotes the Mon is disputed. U-tain Wongsathit and his co-authors read it so; Walailak Songsiri rejects the identification, and with it the reading of a Khmer conquest of Lavo between 1011 and 1014. The earliest rmeñ is in a Kyansittha inscription of 1102, and Middle Mon rman was probably taken from Pali by way of Haripuñjaya, nearly a century after Suryavarman I.

Christian Bauer reads the epigraphy as showing Mon in use in the lower Chao Phraya basin until the 8th or 9th century, and holds that by 1167 the same area must already have been Khmer-speaking. He gives the latest Mon inscription of the upper basin as a terracotta stupa from Mueang district, Nakhon Sawan. Mon was written for longer in the region south of Lamphun and Chiang Mai, where Mon inscriptions of the 12th and 13th centuries are attested. Five Old Mon inscriptions recovered in Chiang Mai province are absent from H. L. Shorto's dictionary of the Mon inscriptions and antedate those from the Lamphun sites; two are votive images from Saraphi district, now in the National Museum, Lopburi. A Mon inscription of the 8th or 9th century from northeastern Thailand carries a negative marker that Bauer takes to be Khmer. Citing his own earlier work, he gives the earliest vernacular gloss in Mon identifying an illustration as a 6th-century amulet-type object from Chansen, Nakhon Sawan province, inscribed in Old Mon on the obverse. The Mon sīmā stones of northeastern Thailand, of the 8th or 9th century, illustrate Jātaka scenes but carry inscriptions about the donor rather than glosses. Claude Jacques, reported by Sarah Talbot, gives Pali as the only scholarly language known from the Dvaravati kingdoms to the west, and the use of Old Mon as a distinctive characteristic of the early communities of the northeast. On that account the first Old Mon inscriptions found in Thailand came in 1968, from votive tablets at Mueang Fa Daet, and over thirty more have been found in Thailand and Burma since the early 1970s.

Bauer traces a comparable donor relation to Thai. He derives modern Thai tham "to do" and its doublet kratham from Old Mon kindaṁ, attested from the 7th century. In Sukhothai Inscription II he identifies a verb carrying an Old Mon prefix found nowhere else in Thai epigraphy, and concludes that the first language of its writer may not have been Thai but Mon. Writing on the Jātaka glosses at Wat Sri Chum, he holds that Sukhothai inscriptions of the 14th and 15th centuries, "and perhaps even later", are hard to interpret not only because the language was still changing but also, and in his view more importantly, because of interference from Mon. Where such interference must be assumed, those inscriptions may not serve as chronological benchmarks. In the same glosses he reads a possible instrumental marker ṇa as a borrowing from Old Mon naʼ, if the reading is correct, and finds the absence of honorific classifiers paralleled in Old Mon.

Borrowing into Old Khmer

Mon also gave particles to Old Khmer. Bauer holds that Old Khmer is likely to have borrowed a limited number of them between the 9th and the 11th centuries. Among them are a second subordinating marker "man", beside Khmer's own "tel" and "syañ", and a clause-final "ra".