Andreas Johansson wrote:
>>I know nothing of the language, but the Cham people used to have an empire
>>called Champa in what's now soutern Vietnam (roughly what was South
Vietnam
>>minus the Mekong delta). Eventually got conquered and assimilated by the
>>Vietnamese - the realm lasted from the 200s to the early 1800s, with the
>>golden age in the later middle ages.
(snip)
>I wrote "assimilated by the Vietnamese" above, should've been "mostly
>assimilated ..."
According to the summary of one ref. on google, VN TV apparently airs an
hour or two daily in a Chamic language (there are several), so all is not
lost. In colonial days (and even in 1958-9 when I was there) the Vietnamese
referred to all the minority tribes as "moi" (or perhaps mu'o'i-- u- and
o-hook; but it sounded like [moj]), a pejorative term whose meaning I
forget. The polite term was Montagnard. Perhaps the current government is
trying harder to integrate them into VN society.