Cham
/tʃam
/noun (plural same or Chams)
1A member of an indigenous people of Vietnam and Cambodia, who formed an independent kingdom from the 2nd to 17th centuries ad.Eighty-four per cent of the population are ethnic Vietnamese, 2 per cent ethnic Chinese, and the remainder are Khmers, Chams, and members of some sixty ethno-linguistic groups each with its own language and culture....
- As for the Khmer Rouge, while they were guilty of killing large percentages of the country's Muslim Chams, Vietnamese and Buddhist monks, the bulk of their human targets were alleged political enemies.
- His rule is remembered as glorious by present-day Cham.
2 [mass noun] The Austronesian language of the Cham, with about 230,000 speakers.They speak Cham, and keep the old Cham traditions....
- They speak Western Cham, a Malayo-Polynesian language that uses an old Devanagari script; the alphabet in which many modern Indian languages are written.
- Among tribal languages, Cham is the most important.
adjective
Relating to the Cham, their culture, or their language.Words in the Cham language contain up to three syllables....
- ‘Please pray for the Cham people,’ he asks his classmates.
- We went out to My Son for a tour of the Cham ruins and again I was struck by the technological advances made so early on, in particular the absolutely immense number of uniform bricks.