Thailand's Khmer as ‘invisible minority’: Language, ethnicity and cultural politics in north-eastern Thailand

Ethnic Khmer speakers in Thailand number over a million. Yet, despite their large numbers, they are regarded as an 'invisible minority', largely inconspicuous in the nation's arena of cultural politics. Their invisibility has, to some extent, to do with their overall cultural similarity with surrounding ethnic Lao speakers of Thailand's north-eastern 'Isan' region; like Isan Lao, they are syncretic Theravada Buddhists, and their village life revolves around wet rice agriculture. Such similarity contrasts with the conspicuous differences marking other minorities of Thailand, such as the Muslims in the south, or highlanders in the north. But Khmer invisibility is also the result of cultural politics at the national level, and with the specific histories of these nation-states in the modern period. This paper examines the apathy towards Khmer identity in Thailand, both in the historical context of Thai nation-building and in specific language policies and practices. Keywords: Northern KhmerThailandethnicitynationalismcultural politics Notes 1 Suwilai (Citation1996, pp. 16 – 18) lists the populations of Khmer speakers in each of the following provinces: Ubon Ratchathani, Srisaket, Surin, Buriram, Nakhon Ratchasima, Sakaew, Prachinburi, Mahasarakham, Roi Et, Chachaoengsao, Chantaburi, Trat, and a small category of 'other'. Surin has the largest number of speakers (518,527), followed by Buriram (425,604) and Srisaket (284,482). Suwilai (Citation1996, p. 22) cites the variety spoken in Surin as 'standard Northern Khmer', reflecting the tendency for linguistics to find or create a central Northern Khmer—an example of what Bakhtin (Citation1981) terms 'centripetal' forces on language. In fact, Surin dialect was designated as 'Standard Northern Khmer' by a group of linguists in 1988, over the remonstrances of some Cambodian scholars arguing for unity with lowland Cambodian (Thomas, Citation1990, pp. 103 – 4). 2 Khmer in Isan call their language, among other things, khmer leu (Thai: khmer sung, English: high Khmer) and the Khmer of Cambodia, khmer krom or, in Thai, khmer tam (meaning 'low Khmer'). Low/high marks a geographical distinction since the southern tier of Isan sits on a high plateau to the north of the Cambodian state. But these terms are relative. Khmer speakers in Phnom Penh refer to themselves as khmer kandal; khmer krom refers to Khmer speakers living in the Mekong delta in the Vietnamese state, and khmer leu refers to non-Khmer speaking highlanders in the Cambodian provinces of Rattanakiri and Mondulkiri. 3 Northern Khmer speakers, when describing their relation to Cambodian, can to a certain extent choose whether they want to emphasize mutual intelligibility or unintelligibility, depending on the situation and their aims at the time. 4 For a discussion of the different sentiments regarding 'Lao' and 'Isan' identities, see McCargo and Krisadawan (Citation2004). 5 Khmer villagers where I researched began using Kampuchea as the name for Cambodia in order to distinguish it, but said this was not done in the past. 6 It is also interesting that the Thai government always depicted the Communist Party as being necessarily something other than 'Thai' (Chai-anan, Citation1991, p. 73), implying that one could not be ethnically or nationally Thai and communist at the same time. 7 Explanations or this atrocity vary. Thai authorities suggest that repatriating refugees in Preah Vihear was more humane than repatriating them in Chantaburi because the Vietnamese forces controlling the Preah Vihear region were likely to be more merciful than the Khmer Rouge forces controlling the areas contiguous to Chantaburi. But the fact that Thai authorities had ordered forcible repatriation of these refugees into a war zone, and the cruel means by which they effected this repatriation, suggest that mercy was not an especially high priority. 8 Esman is worth quoting in full. He writes (Citation1990, p. 188), 'Thailand is an example of a consistent unremitting, and uncompromising language policy—the promotion by state elites of the language and indeed the specific dialect of the largest and politically dominant community as the exclusive medium of communication in every dimension of life that is affected by the activities of government. The limited exception for Malay-speaking Muslims in the far south is a reluctant concession to a small minority that is willing to accept marginal political status rather than yield its culture. Minority languages and even dialects of Thai are systematically devalued and delegitimatized. Anyone who wishes to advance in the world must do so in standard Thai. This unilingual policy is in the service of an assimilationist strategy that seeks eventually—and the sooner the better—to eliminate and supplant existing ethnic pluralism, thereby incorporating all the permanent residents of the land into a culturally homogeneous, therefore unified, Thai political community'. Although Esman may be overstating government intolerance for other languages and dialects, his points about social mobility and the incorporation into a unified Thai political community are well conceived. 9 In what is really a penetrating article, however, Diller shows how 'Central Thai' is actually a rather complicated concept, and how its complexity is obscured by common usage and misconceptions about the homogeneous nature of language. 10 Seidenfaden (Citation1958, p. 115) observed that a few years earlier, in about 1911, 'The Khmers, in spite of Thai only being taught in the schools, still cling to their language and any particular custom of their's own [sic] but are as good Thai citizens as any Thai.' 11 Some of Phibul's directives were decidedly odd. To modernize Thailand, for example, he ordered that certain Western practices be observed, including that all men wear Western-style hats and kiss their wives goodbye when they went to work. See Kobkua (Citation1995).