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Concept
Chams
Summary
The Chams (Cham: ꨌꩌ, Čaṃ) or Champa people (Cham: , Urang Campa; Người Chăm or Người Chàm; ជនជាតិចាម, ) are an Austronesian ethnic group in Southeast Asia, and indigenous people of Central Vietnam.
The Cham people are largely Muslims in Vietnam and predominantly Buddhist Cambodia.
From 2nd century to 1832, the Cham populated Champa, a collection of independent principalities in what is now central and southern Vietnam.
The Cham people speak the Cham language and the Tsat language (the latter is spoken by the Utsul, a Cham sub-group on China's Hainan Island), the two Chamic languages from the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian family.
For a long time, researchers believed that the Chams had arrived by sea in the first millennium BC from Sumatra, Borneo and the Malay Peninsula, eventually settling in central modern Vietnam.
The original Cham are therefore the likely heirs of Austronesian navigators from Taiwan and Borneo, whose main activities are commerce, transport and perhaps also piracy. Austronesian Chamic peoples might have migrated into present-day Central Vietnam around 3 kya to 2.5 kya (1,000 to 500 BC). With having formed a thalassocracy leaving traces in written sources, they invested the ports at the start of important trade routes linking India, China and Indonesian islands. Historians are now no longer disputing in associating the Sa Huynh culture (1000 BC–200 AD) with the ancestors of the Cham people and other Chamic-speaking groups.
Patterns and chronology of migration remain debated and it is assumed that the Cham people, the only Austronesian ethnic group originated from South Asia, arrived later in peninsular Southeast Asia via Borneo. Mainland Southeast Asia had been populated on land routes by members of the Austroasiatic language family, such as the Mon people and the Khmer people around 5,000 years ago. The Cham were accomplished Austronesian seafarers that from centuries populated and soon dominated maritime Southeast Asia. Earliest known records of Cham presence in Indochina date back to the second century CE.
Official source
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