| Chru | |
| States: | Vietnam |
| Ethnicity: | Churu people |
| Speakers: | 19,000 |
| Date: | 2009 census |
| Ref: | e18 |
| Familycolor: | Austronesian |
| Fam3: | Malayo-Sumbawan (?) |
| Fam4: | Chamic |
| Fam5: | Highland |
| Fam6: | Chru–Northern |
| Iso3: | cje |
| Glotto: | chru1239 |
| Glottorefname: | Chru |
Chru (Vietnamese: Chu Ru) is a Chamic language of Vietnam spoken by the Churu people in southern Lâm Đồng Province (especially in Đơn Dương District) and in Ninh Thuận Province.
Like the other Chamic languages spoken in Vietnam (Cham, Jarai, Rade and Roglai), use of Chru is declining as native speakers are generally bilingual in Vietnamese, which is used for most official or public settings, like schools.
The following table lists the consonants of Chru.[1]
| Labial | Apical | Alveolo- palatal | Velar | Glottal | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||
| Plosive | voiceless | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |
| voiced | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||
| Fricative | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||||
| Approximant | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||||
There exist post-aspirated consonants pronounced as /[ph]/, pronounced as /[th]/, pronounced as /[kh]/, but these behave as sequences of stop plus pronounced as /[h]/. For example, from the word pronounced as /phaː/ ('to plane') the nominal pronounced as /pənhaː/ ('a plane') can be derived by infixation of -n-.
The vowel inventory is given in the following table. All vowels but pronounced as /[eː, o, oː]/ exist in nasalized form.
| Front | Central | Back | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| High | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||
| Upper Mid | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |
| Lower Mid | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||
| Low | pronounced as /link/ | |||
The vowel pronounced as /[eː]/ is always followed by pronounced as /[ŋ]/.
Words consist of up to two pre-syllables, and a main syllable. A full example is pronounced as /pətərbləʔ/ ('to turn over'). The vowels in the pre-syllables are always pronounced as /[ə]/ after a consonant and pronounced as /[a]/ otherwise.
Like many other languages of Southeast Asia, including Vietnamese, Chru is an analytic (or isolating) language without morphological marking of case, gender, number, or tense. In its typological profile it reflects extensive language contact effects, as it more closely resembles a Mon-Khmer language with monosyllabic roots and impoverished morphology rather than a canonical Austronesian language with bisyllabic roots and derivational morphology (Grant 2005). It has subject-verb-object (SVO) word order.
Chru uses a pre-verbal negative particle, pronounced as //ʔbuh// as a simple negative in declarative sentences: