From New York City, this is Luxicon Valley, a podcast about language.

I'm John McWhorter, and this time we're going to do a geek out episode.

You seem to like the language family shows and so do I, and I have always wanted to do

South East Asia.

We're talking about that little pouch where there's Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia and Thailand.

What's going on down there?

You might justifiably think that there's some one language family that exists there,

and you might think it has something to do with Chinese.

Chinese has relatives, and there must be relatives of Chinese spoken down there.

The people in those particular countries, physically, they look somewhat alike from a distance,

and from a distance, the languages sound kind of similar, i.e. they sound kind of like

Chinese.

So you'd think that the language family situation in Southeast Asia is pretty transparent,

but no, it's not.

All sorts of stuff has been going on down there, and is now.

It's a fascinating region.

And I dedicate this episode to my colleague and friend Jim Matasov, who I worked with in

the Berkeley linguistics department back in the day, and he and I are still in touch.

And my introduction to the languages of this part of the world was through him.

There's so much that I would never know if I hadn't known Jim.

So Jim, this one goes out to you.

These languages can be hard to get a handle on if you are an Indo-European language speaker.

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