important language family having three subfamilies: Munda, spoken by several million people in eastern India; Nicobarese, with a few thousand speakers in the Nicobar Islands; and Mon-Khmer, divided into 12 branches with almost 100 languages spoken by some 35 to 45 million people in Southeast Asia. Among Mon-Khmer languages are Khmer, the national language of Cambodia; Mon, a closely related language spoken in parts of Burma and Thailand; and Vietnamese.

The Munda languages are polysyllabic and differ from other Austro-Asiatic languages in their word formation and sentence structure (see INDIAN LANGUAGES,). In the Mon-Khmer subfamily, Khmer and Mon have borrowed many words from the Indian languages Sanskrit and Pali. In the Viet-Muong branch of Mon-Khmer, Vietnamese was heavily influenced by Chinese; it is monosyllabic and has a complex tone system, as do other Viet-Muong languages. A few other Mon-Khmer languages have simple tone systems; much more common, however, are differentiations of vowel quality—breathy, creaky, or normal. Suffixes are not found in Mon-Khmer languages, but prefixes and infixes are common. In sentences, final particles may indicate the speaker’s attitude, and special modifiers called expressives convey images of colors, noises, and feelings. Some languages lack voiced stops such as g, d, and b. Words may end with palatized consonants such as ñ. Other distinctive sounds include imploded d and b, produced by suction of breath.

Mon and Khmer are written with Indian-derived alphabets. Vietnamese was written for centuries with modified Chinese characters. In 1910, however, a system was adopted that uses the Roman alphabet with additional signs; invented in 1650, it was the earliest writing system to notate tones, for which it uses accent marks.