4 LANGUAGES OF SOUTHERN INDO-CIIINA. 



like a distinction without a difference ; but certain it is, at any 

 rate, that Cham contains a very large percentage (perhaps 

 nearly 50 per cent.) of pure Malayan words; and in this respect 

 it seems to exceed its neighbours, the dialects to be next men- 

 tioned. 



It is in the hilly country bounding Annam on the west and 

 separating it from the valley of the Mekong River, about lat. 

 13° and 14° N., that these three dialects are found : they are 

 spoken by three savage tribes called respectively Cancho, 

 Rode and Chreai. These tribes appear to be on much the same 

 plane of civilization as the Orang Hutan of the South of the 

 Malay Peninsula ; their dialects are unwritten, and we owe 

 such slight knowledge of them as we possess to the investiga- 

 tions of the three or four French explorers and administrators 

 who have interested themselves in them. Practically that 

 merely amounts to vocabularies of about 120 or 150 words of 

 each of these dialects.* Besides these, there are other dialects 

 in this region which are apparently more or less related to the 

 above, and of some of which even less is known : f most of them 

 however show decidedly more relationship with the Mon- Annam 

 than with the Malayan family, the elements which they have 

 in common with the latter decreasing in relative importance as 

 one proceeds north and west from the old Cham region. 



The only other dialect I propose to deal with here belongs 

 to a different quarter altogether : it is spoken by the Selung 

 (or Silung or Salone, as they are variously called) a sea-faring 

 race who inhabit the numerous islands that fringe the Western 

 Shore of Tenasserim (Lower Burma) from about lat. 13° N. to 

 about lat. 10° N., and are marked on maps with the rather 

 highsounding title of the Mergui Archipelago. 



These people may fairly enough be styled a distant branch 

 of the Orang Laut. Their physical type, to judge from photo- 

 graphs, is more or less that of a rude Malayan race, with (possi- 

 bly) some admixture of other elements, (of which the Indo- 

 nesian may be one, as the Selungs, or at least some of them, are 



* These are given in Moura, " Le Royaume clu Cambodge." 



I Of the Bahnar, however, a good dictionary by Dourisboure has 



been published (Hong Kong, 1889). It is a Mon-Annam dialect, but 



contains a certain number of Malayan words. 



Jour. Straits Branch. 



