Family of about 130 Austroasiatic languages , spoken by more than 80 million people in South and Southeast Asia.
Khmer ; Kuay (Kuy), with perhaps 800,000 speakers; and Mon, spoken by more than 800,000 people in southern Myanmar and parts of Thailand. Of all the Mon-Khmer languages, only Mon, Khmer, and Vietnamese have written traditions dating earlier than the 19th century. Old Mon, which is attested from the 7th century, was written in a script of South Asian origin that was later adapted by the Burmese (see Mon kingdom ; Indic writing systems ). Typical phonetic features of Mon-Khmer languages are a large vowel inventory and lack of tone distinctions.