down into Cambodia, people were very difficult to understand. One villager I
interviewed had worked for US intelligence in Siem Reap during the war. He told how
he could blend in well with Cambodians, and quickly learned to understand everything;
but he was careful not to speak, as his Northern Khmer accent would be immediately
detected. These differences in variety appear to be longstanding. Thel (1985, p. 103)
argues that political instability and ‘the loss of territorial integrity’ after the fall of
Angkor, roughly between the 14th and 16th centuries, set the geo-linguistic conditions
for Northern Khmer to diverge from the variety spoken in lowland Cambodia.
Bauer (1989), in contrast, suggests that the break might not be as great as is
generally assumed, and that other differences of variety could be more salient than that
between Northern Khmer and Cambodian. Had political borders been drawn
differently in the last 100 years, we might be drawing very different dialect maps. In
general, however, Thomas (1990) is probably right when he argues for substantial
linguistic differences between the two varieties, and, most importantly for present
purposes, it appears Northern Khmer speakers often exploit this difference in variety to
distinguish themselves from Cambodia, linguistically, culturally and politically.3
If Northern Khmer are linguistically distinct from Cambodians, they are