Linguist races to save a dying language spoken in Cambodia

Rich Clabaugh/Staff

With no more than 10 speakers remaining of S'aoch, a language spoken on Cambodia's sea shore, French linguist Jean-Michel Filippi is in a race against time to preserve a disappearing culture.

April 27, 2010
By Jared Ferrie, Correspondent
The Christian Science Monitor
Samrong Loeu Village, Cambodia

In halting, creaky tones, the elderly chief of this tiny community spoke in his indigenous language, S'aoch, an ancient tongue linguists predict will be extinct within a generation.

Noi, who goes by a single name, is one of 10 still fluent in S'aoch, and this village of 110 people is the last vestige of a disappearing culture.

S'aoch is one of about 3,000 languages endangered worldwide, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization: One of them disappears about every two weeks. In Cambodia alone, 19 languages face extinction this century.

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