Ethnodiachrony, Buddhism, and ethnicity: An anthropological approach to Khmer dialectology

Abstract The paper focuses on how ethnicity is constructed and negotiated as well as on how it surfaces through language convergence. The paper aims to demonstrate that, in the very specific Khmer case, dialect convergences cannot be explained through an exclusive internal analysis of the linguistic system that would dismiss the comprehension of the anthropological environment. It is shown that external anthropological factors bound to ethnicity are to be taken into account in the understanding of dialect convergences.