Koreanis the official language of both North Korea and South Korea. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in China. There are about 80 million Korean speakers, with large groups in various Post-Soviet states, as well as in other diaspora populations in China, Australia, the United States, Canada, Brazil, Japan, and more recently, the Philippines. The genealogical classification of the Korean language is debated. Many linguists place it in the Altaic language family, but some consider it to be a language isolate. It is agglutinative in its morphology and SOV in its syntax. Like the Japanese and Vietnamese languages, Korean language was influenced by the Chinese language in the form of Sino-Korean words. Native Korean words account for about 35% of the Korean vocabulary, while about 60% of the Korean vocabulary consists of Sino-Korean words. The remaining 5% comes from loan words from other languages, 90% of which are from English. Names The Korean names for the language are based on the names for Korea used in North and South Korea. In North Korea and Yanbian in China, the language is most often called Chos?nmal , or more formally, Chos?n?. In the Republic of Korea, the language is most often called Hangukmal , or more formally, Hangugeo or Gugeo . It is sometimes colloquially called Urimal ("our language"; in one word in South Korea, with a space in North Korea). On the other hand, Korean people in the former USSR, who refer to themselves as Koryo-saram call the language Goryeomal .

Khmer, or Cambodian, is the language of the Khmer people and the official language of Cambodia. One of the more prominent Austroasiatic languages, the language has been considerably influenced by Sanskrit and Pali, especially in the royal and religious registers, through the vehicles of Hinduism and Buddhism. As a result of geographic proximity, the Khmer language has affected, and also been affected by, Thai, Lao, Vietnamese and Cham which all form a sprachbund in peninsular Southeast Asia. Khmer differs from neighboring languages such as Thai, Lao and Vietnamese in that it is not a tonal language. It has three main dialects that are mutually intelligible: * Battambang (considered the standard) * Phnom Penh * Northern Khmer, also known as Khmer Surin, spoken by ethnic Khmer native to Northeast Thailand * Cardamom Khmer, an archaic form spoken by a small population in the Cardamom Mountains of western Cambodia. History Linguistic study of the Khmer language divides its history into four periods. Pre-Angkorian Khmer, the language after its divergence from Proto-Mon-Khmer until the ninth century, is only known from words and phrases in Sanskrit texts of the era. Old Khmer (or Angkorian Khmer) is the language as it was spoken in the Khmer Empire from the 9th century until the weakening of the empire sometime in the 13th century. Old Khmer is attested by many primary sources and has been studied in depth by a few scholars, most notably Saveros Pou, Phillip Jenner and Heinz-Jürgen Pinnow. Following the end of the Khmer Empire the language lost the standardizing influence of being the language of government and accordingly underwent a turbulent period of change in morphology, phonology and lexicon. The language of this transition period, from about the 14th to 18th centuries, is referred to as Middle Khmer and saw borrowing from Thai, Lao and, to a lesser extent, Vietnamese. The changes during this period are so profound that the rules of Modern Khmer can not be applied to correctly understand the Old Khmer. The language became recognizable as the Modern Khmer spoken today in the 19th century. Khmer is classified as a member of the Eastern branch of the Mon-Khmer language family, itself a subdivision of the larger Austro-Asiatic language group, which has representatives in a large swath of land from Northeast India down through Southeast Asia to the Malay Peninsula and its islands. As such, its closest relatives are the languages of the Pearic, Bahnaric, and Katuic families spoken by the hill tribes of the region. The Vietic languages have also been classified as belonging to this family.